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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



-43^ 

Chap, Copyright No*.___ 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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THE INSPIRATION OF HISTORY 



By the Same A uthor 



Christianity in the 
Daily Conduct of Life 

i2mo, $1-50 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, Publisher 

2 and 3 Bible House 

New York 



THE 



Inspiration of History 



BY 



JAMES MULCHAHEY, S.T.D. 

Vicar-Emeritus of St. Paul's Chapel, 
Trinity Parish, N. Y. 



9 1B96 . ,. &-* 



.,^3J^ 



New York : 

THOMAS WHITTAKER 
2 and 3 Bible House 

1S96 






Copyright, 1896 

By James Mulchahey 



BURR PRINTING HOU8E, NEW YORK* 



CONTENTS 



Chapter I. Introductory ; The Credibility of 

History . . . . .1 

Chapter II. The Bible a Historical Book . 19 

Chapter III. The Significance of the Biblical 

History, Simply as History . . .33 

Chapter IV. The Substantial Truth of Biblical 
History, not Invalidated by " Higher Criti- 
cism " . . . . . .43 

Chapter V. The Inspiration of the Old Testa- 
ment History . . . . .65 

Chapter VI. The Witness of History to the 

Divine Personality of Jesus Christ . . 95 

Chapter VII. Conclusion : A Living Conscious- 
ness of Communion with the Living God — 
the God of Kighteousness and of Love — the 
Present Need of the Church, and its True 
Inspiration . . . . .117 



THE CREDIBILITY OF HISTORY. 



THE INSPIRATION OF HISTORY. 



CHAPTER I. 

Introductory : 

THE CREDIBILITY OF HISTORY. 

History is in our time emphatically under sus- 
picion. So many of its alleged and heretofore uni- 
versally accredited facts have, within the last half 
century, been resolved by the new methods of his- 
torical criticism into fictions, that, in the popular 
mind, there is a general disposition to question its 
old claim to trustworthiness. 

Indeed, not only in the popular mind, but even 
among the really thoughtful and scholarly, the ques- 
tion is seriously raised whether the credibility to 
which the records of history are entitled can be 
accounted scientific in any true sense of the word. 

And yet the old foundation ground remains firm. 
There is to mankind an existence in the past as sure 
as in the present, and history is the record which 
that past lias made. Fiction and history are a con- 



2 THE CREDIBILITY OF HISTORY. 

tradiction in terms. History has no business with 
anything but fact, and its legitimate business is 
nothing else but to keep determined facts perma 
nently known. The very root-meaning of the word 
is to know. Its essential substance is fact-Jcnowl- 
edge. Its function in life is nothing else but to be 
perpetually the self-revelation, the monumental 
witness of fact. 

History has been eloquently declared to be the 
memory of mankind, and, obviously, in the life 
of the world at large it occupies the place and ful- 
fils the function which memory does in the life of 
each individual man. Memory is a blank without 
fact, and fact remembered is fact known — res acta, 
fait accompli — fact identified with the man's own 
life and forming a constituent element in his very 
existence. 

It does not follow that the memory of any one 
is, or is supposed to be, absolutely infallible. It is, 
in fact, seldom or never so. In every one it is 
under the limitations of human imperfection, and 
so, liable to inaccuracies both of record and report. 
In many cases it has no hold on or capability of re- 
taining circumstantial details, and sometimes its 
supposed impressions are the mere hallucinations 
of a disordered imagination. But, nevertheless, 
memory is to every one's living consciousness the 



THE CREDIBILITY OF HISTORY. 3 

only witness of his experience, of what has hap- 
pened to him, and of what has been done, said, or 
thought by him in the past ; and it is justly ac- 
cepted and trusted as such. 

The reason is obvious. Memory is nothing else 
but the recorder of fact. Whether, in strict truth, 
itself a recorder, or simply the record — an active 
faculty or impressionable process — it may not be 
easy to say ; but the essential point is that its very 
existence depends on fact. "Without fact there is 
no possibility of memory. The slightest divergence 
from impression of fact in the mind of a man va- 
cates for him the function of memory and puts 
imagination in its place. Therefore when a man 
says, " I remember," he means to say simply that 
he retains the impression of a certain event or deed 
in his past life ; and after making all due allow- 
ance for human imperfection, if he is sure that it 
is memory which now quickens his consciousness 
to a perception of the past event or deed, he is as 
sure of its actual occurrence and of his experience 
through it as he is or can be of his present existence. 

Now all this is equally true of history in the gen- 
eral life of mankind. It may be conceded at once 
that history may be inaccurate in many circumstan- 
tial details, and that no inconsiderable part of its 
generally accepted records is absolutely fictitious, 



4 THE CREDIBILITY OF HISTORY. 

or so inaccurate in statement, by either omission or 
exaggeration, as to be utterly untrustworthy ; but, 
nevertheless, history, on the whole, is trustworthy. 
It depends on truth, the truth of fact, for its very 
being. Its business is with fact, and with nothing- 
else. Without fact — fact that has actually occurred 
— there can be no history. The slightest divergence 
from fact in any pretended record puts that record 
so far out of the category of history and relegates 
it to that of fiction or poetry. 

But, it may be said, conceding all this to be true 
of history in the abstract, it yet determines nothing 
for practical purpose as to the trustworthiness of 
history in any particular. And this is the real 
difficulty in dealing with its alleged facts. They 
come to us in detail, and we have to examine them 
separately, one by one. It is easy enough to say 
that they are not history if they be not true ; but 
our definition has not the least effect toward de- 
termining whether they are true or not— the very 
point which is important for us to be determined. 
Trust in history is of little consequence if the trust 
be only in an abstraction. TTliat we want for prac- 
tical purpose is to know how far we can trust, or 
whether we can trust at all, this or that document 
or allegation which comes to us with a claim to be 
historical, and therefore true. 



THE CREDIBILITY OF HIS TOBY. 5 

Granting this, yet something is gained, surely, 
in having determined at the outset what history 
itself truly and properly is. We know, then, on 
what ground we stand and what our own attitude 
upon it ought to be. 

But is it quite true, or rather is it the whole 
truth to say that the records of history are to be 
taken by us in separate details, and the truth of 
them determined by subjecting them to examina- 
tion on their own evidential merit, separately and 
one by one ? No doubt there is a sense in which 
it is true to say that history is made up of docu- 
ments and records which have their place in it de- 
termined by the verifiable credit of each one on its 
own merits ; true also that its reports come to us 
in details. But this is equally true of memory. 
We recollect by recalling incidents ; and our re- 
membrance of the past is more or less complete and 
perfectly accurate just in proportion to the inclu- 
sion in our memory, or failure to include, its every 
incident, each one in its true original relation. 
But confidence in memory, on the whole, does not 
depend on our assurance that we can recall every- 
thing that has occurred. We know perfectly well 
that we cannot — that we cannot in any case or in 
relation to any event, much less in relation to the 
past as a whole. Nevertheless we rightly feel that 



6 HE CBEDIB1LITT OF HISTORY. 

memory is, on the whole, trustworthy, and do 
actually put trust in it ; and that for two reasons : 
First, because, as already stated, we know that 
memory has no other function than to be the record 
and report of actual facts, and also because, as we 
now add, we know that there is a general law which 
combines all essential facts together, and so fixes in 
the memory a true impression of the past as a 
whole, without necessarily recalling every one of 
its incidents in separate detail. 

Now the same law holds in general history, and 
the same conclusion is valid in justification of con- 
fidence in its trustworthiness. Granted that events 
occurring one by one have made up the past his- 
tory of the world in general, as of the life of every 
person ; granted that they have been reported sepa- 
rately, in so far as they have been reported at all, 
and may therefore be so recalled ; but still it is true 
to say that no one of them occurred separately in 
such sense as to have been in absolute isolation. 
The law of cause and effect is the bond of contin- 
uous identity in all life, and by its effective bond 
every historical fact is connected, directly or re- 
motely, with every other fact. Every one as it 
occurs, though an item in severalty, is yet an item 
in combination, always necessarily in combination. 
And it is the co?nbination, rather than the separate 



THE CREDIBILITY OF HISTORY. 7 

items, which makes up the true impression of past 
history. We rightly conclude, therefore, that his- 
tory is trustworthily credible on the whole, even 
though its records are allowed to be incomplete in 
many particulars, or even though in some of their 
details they are found to be false. 

But in the study of history the object unques- 
tionably is to get a correct knowledge of the deeds 
and events which have made up the life of man- 
kind in the past ; and there can be no question of 
the practical importance of determining on the re- 
ports of past occurrences which have come to us as 
items of history, whether they are really such and 
therefore entitled to our acceptance and belief. 
For this purpose they may properly, and indeed 
must be subjected to critical examination and tested 
by the established rules of evidence. To a certain 
extent they may and must be examined separately, 
and each one tested on its own evidential merits — 
only it must always be remembered that the point 
is to determine whether they are or not truly items 
of history. If so, they cannot stand alone, cannot be 
tested in isolation, hnt for the jbial verdict must be 
considered in relation to other occurrences which are 
known to have happened, and which in their combined 
capacity make up the chapter of history in which the 
event under examination is alleged to have occurred. 



8 THE CBEDIBILITT OF HISTORY. 

In so far as records of deeds and events in the 
life of mankind, which have come to us as history, 
can be verified by these tests, they are justly en- 
titled to be accepted as such, and in such accept- 
ance are as justly determined to be credible. The 
facts alleged are then determined to be 'known facts. 
Their truth is demonstrated, and our assurance of 
their occurrence in the past is not less scientific than 
is our assurance of facts all around us in the present. 

No one has stated this general law of historic 
credibility more succinctly than Mr. Huxley. In 
beginning one of his lectures on evolution, he says : 
" The occurrence of historical facts is said to be 
demonstrated when the evidence that they hap- 
pened is of such a character as to render the as- 
sumption that they did not happen in the highest 
degree improbable."* By "the evidence that 
they happened" he clearly means, not the isolated 
evidence of each one on its own merits, but the 
evidence in combination with that of other corre- 
lated facts, the combination being of such character 
as to hold all the alleged facts in legitimate rela- 
tionship with each other, and so finding its com- 
pleteness as a whole only in their legitimate union. 
Wherever such union is traceably determined, he 

* Science and Hebrew Tradition, p. 114. 



THE CREDIBILITY OF HISTORY. 9 

justly concludes the occurrence of the historical fact 
to be " demonstrated." 

The eloquent Pere Lacordaire, in one of his 
famous Notre Dame conferences, * has drawn out a 
statement of the principles on which historic cer- 
tainty is grounded at much greater length. Prefac- 
ing his statement with the definition to which we 
have before referred, of history as " the memory 
of mankind," he propounds three conditions which 
combine to make history, or, more properly, as he 
states it, historical writing, entirely credible and 
trustworthy. 

First. " The writing must be public" — that is, 
it must have for its substantial foundation public 
documents — documents which emanated from peo- 
ple living at a time in the past, and were published 
and circulated among that people at the time or 
within a reasonable period of the time when the 
events to which they refer were in actual occur- 
rence. 

Secondly. " Writing which claims to be history 
must bear upon public events ." 

The words and deeds which are simply those of 
private persons in their individual capacity have, 
obviously, no place in history. Many of the words 

* On Jesus Christ, pp. 174-189. 



10 TEE CREDIBILITY OF HISTORY. 

and deeds even of public personages have no rela- 
tion to public affairs, and, however interesting, are 
to be regarded simply as incidents in private life, 
and have properly no place in general history. In 
very clear recognition of this distinction, Talleyrand 
is said to have replied to one who, bringing to him 
an announcement of the death of Napoleon at St. 
Helena, spoke of it as " a sad event :" " That is 
not an event; it is simply an incident." A few 
years earlier it would have been an event, and one 
of great historical importance. So Lacordaire 
justly declares it to be a necessary condition of his- 
torical certainty that we should " separate the two 
elements," the public and the private, " and give 
to the former, by that separation, all its force and 
all its lustre." 

" The third condition necessary to raise writing 
to the state of history is that the events should 
blend together and form a public and general web." 

" A solitary fact is not a historical fact ; it has 
no real place ; it floats in air. Still much less 
should we give this name to a fact which cannot 
take its place in the general web of history without 
deranging its whole economy. This is the infalli- 
ble sign of imposture. The force of history, like 
the force of every other real order, is in its com- 
pleteness and unity. When a man stands alone, 



TEE CREDIBILITY OF HISTORY. 11 

he is nothing ; when a fact stands alone, it is noth- 
ing. But let a man enter into association with 
others, they form a family, a people, the whole 
human race. And, in like manner, when a fact 
enters into historical association with others, and 
not with others only, but with all the rest ; let it 
become necessary to the general web of history, so 
that history cannot be constructed without that 
fact — then it possesses not only the force of a his- 
torical fact, but the force of all history ; then we 
must accept it or deny the entire life of the human 
race." 

That the combination of these three conditions in 
any case furnishes a demonstration of its occurrence 
as a historical fact, which is, in a true sense, scien- 
tific, seems to us to be clear. And having such 
demonstration for the substantial basis of belief, 
we may safely and reasonably disregard as unworthy 
of consideration all objections against it which, 
however plausible, are based only on special criti- 
cism either of the inherent improbability of the 
fact or the insufficiency of particular evidence for it. 

This may be made clear by one or two illustra- 
tions. A recent writer has attempted, by such 
criticism, to controvert the accepted record of the 
signing of Magna Charta by King John at Runny- 
mede in 1215, and his critical notes of doubt are in 



12 THE CREDIBILITY OF HISTORY. 

themselves really plausible. But it is a sufficient 
reply to say that the entire course of subsequent 
English history depends on that fact, and was un- 
deniably determined by it. An event which might 
in itself have belonged only to the annals of domes- 
tic life, and of which the evidence would, in that 
case, have been no stronger than such as is cus- 
tomarily afforded in domestic records, is referred to 
by Professor G. W. Protheroy, in his Edinburgh 
University inaugural address, * as an illustration of 
the demonstrative authentication which is given 
even to such a fact by having its place as a deter- 
mining factor in general history. The event re- 
ferred to was the marriage of Henry II. of England 
to Eleanor of Aquitaine in the Cathedral of Lisieux, 
in the year of our Lord 1150. " That marriage," 
as he says, " gave the kings of England a great 
domain in France, and entailed long wars between 
the two countries. This struggle, lasting through- 
out the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was the 
chief cause of the baronial anarchy which culmi- 
nated in the wars of the Roses. The Tudor despo- 
tism was the outcome of those wars, and in trying 
to maintain that despotism the Stuarts lost their 
throne. The revolution which overthrew the 

Printed in National Review, December, 1894. 



THE CREDIBILITY OF HISTORY. 13 

Stuarts gave supremacy to Parliament, and led 
directly to the union. Finally, the Parliament of 
Great Britain, after proving its capacity by creating 
the British Empire and defeating Napoleon, formed 
the model of civil government throughout the civil- 
ized world. And so we may, nay, we must, treat 
any great historical event, until the ages are i bound 
each to each by natural piety.' " 

One more illustration, and that a very striking 
one, may be given from our own American history 
— viz., the signing of the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence by the members of the Continental Congress 
in the year 1776. This is a fact which was wit- 
nessed in the deed and authenticated in the publi- 
cation by only friendly partisans, and arguments 
might easily be found by captious critics to show 
the improbability of the commonly received his- 
torical account of it, and to raise a question whether 
those whose names are now found attached to that 
instrument are really entitled to the honor they 
have received. It might be said that the signing 
of such a declaration, at the time it is alleged to 
have taken place, is highly improbable because, in 
the first place, of the then relative strength of Eng- 
land and America. On the one hand there was an 
empire second in all the elements of national power 
to none other on earth, while, on the other side, 



U THE CREDIBILITY OF HISTORY. 

there were only a few young and feeble colonies. 
To have arrayed these colonies in opposition to such 
a power as this declaration assumed to do, could 
hardly have been done by reasonable men. They 
must have seen that all the probabilities were 
against their success in such an unequal conflict ; 
and, for themselves, the pledge of their lives, their 
fortunes, and sacred honor to it was simply suicidal, 
a stake so desperate under the circumstances that it 
could not have been made without a degree of un- 
selfish heroism which is more than human. On 
the other hand, the forging or the antedating of 
documents is not difficult ; and it is easy to see that 
when in the marvellous course of events the United 
States did actually become independent, there were 
motives strong enough to have induced the forging 
or antedating of this, since nothing could be more 
creditable to these congressional legislators than to 
have anticipated so improbable a fact by so heroic 
a declaration. 

Now all such criticism is certainly very absurd ; 
but, let us observe, it is absurd simply because we 
know that there is a vast amount of genuine his- 
torical evidence in proof of the fact, sufficient to 
render it absolutely certain. We know that not 
only by the congressional record of the day, but 
also by all the struggles of the Revolutionary War, 



THE CREDIBILITY OF HISTORY. 15 

by all the history of our country since, and by its 
very existence as a nation now, this fact is authenti- 
cated beyond the possibility of question or shadow 
of reasonable doubt. 

In the light of these illustrations, the foregoing 
considerations seem clearly to warrant the following 
conclusions : 

I. History has a substantial basis of fact, the 
truth of which is scientifically determinable. 

II. Its trustworthy credibility is not invalidated 
by discoveries of errors in special details. 

III. Historical criticism, to be of any value, must 
take into account not only the special evidence of 
particular incidents, but also the entire body of evi- 
dence which is afforded by the combination of these 
incidents with all others with which they are con- 
nected or correlated. 



THE BIBLE A HISTORICAL BOOK. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE BIBLE A HISTORICAL BOOK. 

It has long ago been settled in the consciousness 
of Christendom that the Bible is, in the truest and 
most proper sense of the word, one book. Its very 
title by which it has come to be universally known, 
and which has been given to it in this conscious- 
ness, indicates the recognition of it not only as a 
book, but, with unique emphasis, as the Book. 

Yery clearly, however, its unity so recognized is 
something different from that which we commonly 
have in mind when we speak of a book. It is not 
a continuous and logically connected discussion of 
one topic ; it is not one as a treatise, a drama, a 
poem, or a history ; it is not one in either the sub- 
ject-matter or the style of its composition ; it is not 
the work of one author, not the product of one 
age, not originally issued in one country, or written 
in one language — in fact, the Bible is, as we all 
know when we give it thought, a Book of many 
original books, sixty-six in all, thirty-nine of the 
Old Testament and twenty-seven of the New. 
And these books were written by almost as many 



20 THE BIBLE A HISTORICAL BOOK 

different authors, in different countries — countries 
as far apart from each other and as different in the 
characteristics of their civilization as Egypt and 
Arabia, Chaldea, Assyria, Judea, and Rome ; in 
different ages, ages of history extending over a 
period of more than a thousand years. 

In the critical investigation of historical docu- 
ments, which is one of the characteristic specialties 
of modern scholarship, the real historical origin of 
the several parts of the Bible has received and is 
receiving such scrutiny as it never had or could 
have had before ; and laying great stress on this 
diversity of authorship, the inference is drawn that 
the Bible can no longer be regarded as essentially 
different from other books, at least not from such 
as treat specially of religious history and doctrine. 

But there is one point of essential difference 
between the Bible and all other books or class of 
books with which it may properly be compared, 
which is strangely overlooked and left entirely out 
of account by those who are disposed to rest in this 
conclusion. Suppose we should collect and bind 
up in one volume the literature — the books accred- 
ited as the classics — of an equal number of countries 
in other parts of the world for an equally long 
period ; or, to make the case more exactly parallel, 
suppose it were possible to trace the history of any 



THE BIBLE A HISTORICAL BOOK. 21 

other ancient race of men scattered through as many 
successive ages among other peoples in as many 
different parts of the world, and so far identified 
with each of these nations as to participate in the 
diversified characteristics of their various civiliza- 
tions ; and suppose such tracing to be made through 
documentary evidences written at different periods 
in one country and another ; and then that all these 
documents should be collected and bound up in one 
volume — what a heterogeneous book we should 
have ! What diversity, without possible reconcilia- 
tion, in its contents ! What utterly irreconcilable 
differences of thought and feeling ! How unlike and 
altogether out of harmony with each other the views 
of life, the representations of its habitual ways and 
works, the theories of its purpose and destiny would 
be presented by the different authors, representing 
each his own time, people, and age ! How many 
different and disagreeing religions would thus be 
represented ! how many and varying ceremonies 
and modes of worship ! how many gods as the ob- 
jects of worship, with attributed characters as mul- 
tiplied and conflicting as their numerous names ! 
No one with any knowledge of history would ex- 
pect for a moment the possibility of any more har- 
monious result if he should attempt to bring to- 
gether such a collection of the documentary rcpre- 



22 THE BIBLE A HISTORICAL BOOK. 

sentatives of the different stages of ancient civiliza- 
tion for so long a period as fifteen centuries in any 
part of the world. 

But when we turn from this imagined collection 
to that which we actually have in the Bible, what 
do we find ? "Marvellous, and except on one expla- 
nation utterly unaccountable, the fact that from be- 
ginning to end, throughout all its nearly seventy 
separable books, with their original diversities of 
language, scope, purpose, and style, there is a sub- 
stantial agreement^ an accordant harmony, and in 
some important particulars an absolute identity of 
both practical and doctrinal teaching. 

1. First of all, and most important, there is this 
identity of doctrine with respect to the Supreme 
Beixg, the Author and Sustainer of the created 
universe, unto whom all religious worship and ser- 
vice are due and to be rendered. " Hear, Israel, 
the Lord our God is oxe Lord. "* This is the fun- 
damental proclamation which is accepted and held 
with faith that is absolutely identical by every 
writer of every book, and never lost sight of or de- 
parted from on any page or in any word of the 
Bible, from beginning to end. The Bible is em- 
phatically, as its unique distinction, the Book of God. 

* Deut. 6 : 4. 



THE BIBLE A HISTOBICAL BOOK 23 

Its one purpose is to tell of Him : His being, na- 
ture, and will. In the consciousness of every reader 
this purpose differentiates it, and makes it stand 
apart from all other books ; and no matter what 
the special object of any one of its particular books, 
its one dominating purpose is ever felt to be the 
revelation of God and of His supreme dominion in 
the world and throughout the universe. 

2. Then, not less remarkable, is the entire agree- 
ment of all its writers in declaring God to he per- 
feetly righteous, holy, and good. From Moses to 
Isaiah and the last of the prophets there is unani- 
mous agreement that there can be no shade of evil 
in God, that from everlasting to everlasting He is 
absolutely perfect in goodness as in power. " The 
Lord, the Lord, a God full of compassion and 
gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy 
and truth ; keeping mercy for thousands, forgiv- 
ing iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will 
by no means clear the guilty."* " Thus saith the 
high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose 
name is Holy : I dwell in the high and holy place, 
with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, 
to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive 
the heart of the contrite ones."f "I will come 

*Ex. 34:6, 7. + Isa. 57: 15. 



24 THE BIBLE A HISTORICAL BOOK 

near to you to judgment ; and I will be a swift wit- 
ness against the sorcerers, and against the adulterers, 
and against false swearers, and against those that 
oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow, and 
the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger 
from his right, and fear not me, saith the Lord of 
hosts. For I the Lord change not ; therefore ye, 
O sons of Jacob, are not consumed."* 

It is not possible to exaggerate the contrast be- 
tween the revelation of God, which is given in such 
passages (and they are but specimens of the unani- 
mous teaching of the Bible throughout in both 
Testaments), and the conceptions of the character of 
supernatural beings, whether of the Supreme Deity 
or of His subordinate divinities, which is found in 
the primitive records and legends of all other an- 
cient peoples. We need not take for this purpose 
the grotesque and monstrous viciousness which 
filled the classic Pantheon with unutterable defile- 
ment. We may go back to the " cleanest and 
purest record of theological belief in all antiquity" 
outside of the Bible, that which is still to be read 
on the monumental stone of the Moabites, and the 
fundamental difference in conception and feeling 
relating to the supernatural, as Professor Sanday, 

* Mai. 3 : 5, 6. 



THE BIBLE A HISTORICAL BOOK. 25 

whose learning and candor are alike unimpeachable, 
observes, is none the less apparent. The most 
pious of the Moabite kings could think, in the des- 
perate extremity of defeat in a final struggle for 
liberty, of no surer way of appeasing the ill-will of 
his god, Chemosh, than to take his oldest son that 
should have reigned in his stead and offer him for a 
burnt-oSering upon the city wall.* There is abun- 
dant evidence that among the Moabites it was cus- 
tomary, as a religious rite with its abominable ac- 
companiments and merciless consequences, to make 
their sons and daughters to " pass through the fires 
to Molech." In view of the undeniable fact that 
in all the ancient ethnic religions there are sure to 
be found, in inseparable connection with much that 
is ennobling, both ideas and practices of degrading 
superstition, Professor Sanday well remarks that 
" the great problem for the student of religions is 
why the religion of Israel alone should be so re- 
markably free from this baser mixture. Why was 
not the worship of Jehovah like the worship of 
Baal, or Tammuz, or Cybele, or Astarte, or Mylitta ? 
Why was it not like the worship of a race so nearly 
akin to Israel as the Moabite ?"f No solution of 
this problem can be admitted as consistent with his- 

* 2 Kings 3 : 27. \ Lectures on Inspiration, p. 139, 



26 TEE BIBLE A HISTOBIGAL BOOK. 

toric truth which does not take into account the 
fact that the religious teachers of the people of 
Israel constantly and invariably taught them, as no 
other people were taught, that God is a Being of 
perfect righteousness, who cannot look on iniquity 
with the least degree of allowance.* 

3. Then there is equal agreement concerning the 
relation of God to us His creatures and our conse- 
quent obligations of duty toward Him, and, in 
and through that fundamental obligation, toward 
each other and toward all created beings. In the 
very beginning of the Mosaic dispensation it was 
declared not less plainly than by the Founder of 
the Christian dispensation fifteen centuries later, 
that to love the Lord God with all the heart, soul, 
mind, and strength, is the first and greatest com- 

* The preparation of Abraham to offer up his son Isaac, 
which seems at first view to be a parallel case with that of 
the king of Moab, was not so in truth. It is recorded as a 
remarkable and entirely exceptional test of his obedient spirit ; 
was not allowed to be consummated ; and no reader of the 
Bible has ever supposed it to be consistent with the Divine 
character as there revealed that its consummation should have 
been allowed. On the other hand, Mesha's sacrifice of his 
son was clearly prompted by the Moabite conception of relig- 
ious devotion and its traditional theory of such sacrifice as 
would be most acceptable to his god, Chemosh, and therefore 
most likely to secure his favor. 



THE BIBLE A HISTORICAL BOOK. 27 

mandment, and to do justice and love mercy to all 
men, even though they be only strangers, not less 
required by the Divine will and in conformity to 
the Divine nature."* And the ethics summarily in- 
culcated and enjoined in the Ten Commandments 
are adhered to without the slightest divergence, as 
constituting the fundamental ethical platform of 
every religious teacher in every stage of the Bible 
history, throughout both the Old Testament and the 
New. 

4. In equal agreement are the Biblical writers, so 
that their teachings constitute an absolute identity 
of doctrine concerning the origin, the purpose, and 
the jmal destiny of our human life ; we might 
even say, of all life in this world of our habitation 
and of the very world itself. This is so very ob- 
vious and unquestionable that we need only to make 
the statement without comment or illustrative ex- 
pansion. Every reader of the Bible recognizes at 
once the picture which it draws, and from which 
no line of it ever varies, of life in this world as a 
gift of Divine creation, of its educational and pro- 
bationary purpose, and of its final destiny, under 
the laws of righteous responsibility, for eternal good 
or ill. 

Such unity of doctrinal teaching in documents of 

* Deut. 10-22. 



28 THE BIBLE A HISTORICAL BOOK. 

such diverse and widely-apart origin would be 
utterly incredible did we not know it to be, in the 
documents which are collected as one book in the 
Bible, the unquestionable fact. 

But this is not the full truth on this point. If 
the Bible were a formal doctrinal treatise, or even 
if its collected books were a collection of such 
treatises by different authors in successively differ- 
ent ages, this perfect agreement on points of the 
most important and fundamental moment would be 
remarkable. But no reader feels that the original 
production of it, as a whole or of its separate books, 
is sufficiently or properly accounted for by attribut- 
ing it or them to such intent and purpose. There 
is doctrinal teaching most certainly, and that, as we 
have seen, of the highest possible importance ; 
but, essentially and throughout, the Bible is a his- 
torical book. Even its doctrinal teachings and dis- 
cussions are primarily historical — that is, they are 
products of actual experience rather than of abstract 
thinking, and are addressed by living men to their 
fellow-men for helpful guidance in daily living. 
Equally so in the Old Testament as in the New, 
and in the varied conditions of culture through 
which the elect people were led in the ages preced- 
ing the time of Christ and His apostles not less than 
in His age and in the light of His revelation. The 



THE BIBLE A HISTORICAL BOOK. 29 

agreement throughout is not only in abstract doc- 
trine, but in doctrine applied, doctrine vitally ex- 
emplified in the daily practice of actual life. The 
unity of the Bible, then, is more than doctrinal 
unity ; there is also in it a unity of historical move- 
ment, a perfectly consistent evolution from begin- 
ning to end. Each book of the Bible carries on the 
historical movement in the line of continuous and 
legitimate development ; so that in reading it we 
are conscious of a steady advancement, and have a 
feeling like that of persons who are ascending to 
the summit of some great mountain, where every 
step is an uplift, raising them into a region the air 
of which is felt to be purer and the prospect farther 
extended and more comprehensive of beauty and 
grandeur than before. 

And, moreover, there is throughout a consistent 
conception of this perpetually pervading unity ; so 
that there is wrought in every reader's mind a con- 
sciousness of it as binding the ages of all time in 
one, linking each to each and moving all for one 
grand final purpose, from the beginning of creation 
to the end of time, and even infinitely farther, from 
the eternal beginning " before the world was" 
into the eternal destinies which are to be " world 
without end." 



THE 

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BIBLICAL 
HISTORY, SIMPLY AS HISTORY. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BIBLICAL HISTORY, SIMPLY 
AS HISTORY. 

The unity oi the Bible, as described in our last 
chapter, being an unquestionable fact, demands ex- 
planation as clearly as any other fact in life or his- 
tory. 

It cannot be explained by a supposition of inten- 
tional agreement between the several writers, be- 
cause the wide intervals both of distance and time 
between the writing of the different books plainly 
preclude the possibility of personal collusion. It 
is no more explainable by the theory of fraudulent 
composition by some impostor of later date, for 
even intelligent sceptics are forced to admit that 
this theory is utterly inconsistent with the nature 
and purpose, the intrinsic character, style, and even 
the very language of at least the greater part of 
these books. 

The only explanation which meets all the facts of 
the case is that the books of the Bible were, in their 
origin, outcomes of actual history — that is, they 
are true documentary expressions of such history. 



I 



34 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BIBLICAL HISTOB T. 

Just as, in the successive strata of the rocks which 
incrust our globe, the scientific student finds demon- 
strative evidence of successive periods in the evolu- 
tions of the earthly creation, even so the severally 
successive books of the Bible are outcroppings, as it 
were, of stages in the spiritual creation ; demonstra- 
tive proofs of its legitimate progress and, through- 
out, of its entirely consistent unity of purpose under 
the hands of the Divine Spirit. The hooks of the 
Bible could not have been such as they are, nor the 
Bible as a whole such as it is, except as a produc- 
tion, in the order of the real development or succes- 
sive evolutions, of actual historical progress, 

This may be made clear by an illustration. Every 
one knows the distinction between historical and 
fictitious literature — that the latter has no basis in 
fact, but only in the imagination, while the former 
rests for its credibility and acceptance on its con- 
formity to fact alone. And further, as already 
shown in the first chapter, the very existence of 
historical literature depends on preceding history — 
that is, there must have been actual historical facts 
before there can be a historical record of them. 
This is, of course, true not only of records that 
are purely historical, but also of every department 
of literature in which facts are the essential basis. 
To see the truth of this, think for a moment of the 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BIBLICAL HISTOR F. 35 

many books that make up what we call our national 
literature, and it is at once evident that these could 
not be in existence except as records and expres- 
sions of our national life. 

For further and fuller illustration, take the great 
body of our modern Christian literature. How ex- 
tensive and how multiform it is ! Histories ; biog- 
raphies ; treatises, philosophical and ethical ; ser- 
mons and meditations ; books of hymns and prayers, 
innumerable — every one an outcome of Christian 
history, and all, observe, so dependent on that his- 
tory that not a line or word of their contents could 
have been written had the actual history not have 
been, or had it been other than it was. Take the 
Book of Common Prayer, with the literature clus- 
tering around it. Nothing more certain than its 
existence and its inestimably prized use in the 
church services of our time ; but it is plain to see 
that this Prayer-Book could not have been had not 
the Church been in existence before it, having its ser- 
vices of prayer and praise for which such a manual 
was needed. And hence we can see that if it were 
possible that, by some disastrous revolution, our 
present civilization with all its institutions could be 
entirely overthrown and swept away ; and if in this 
dire catastrophe the Church could be utterly de- 
stroyed ; and if a new civilization should rise upon 



36 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BIBLICAL HISTOB F. 

the ruins and continue for a thousand years or more 
without the least trace in it of such an institution 
as the Church ; and if, then, by some antiquary 
delving in the ruins of past ages, there should hap- 
pen to be found a copy of this old and long-forgot- 
ten Prayer-Book — why, even then and under cir- 
cumstances so little favorable to the conclusion, the 
very book itself would be proof that it once had a 
purpose, and its contents would show that this pur- 
pose must have been the worship of such a Being 
as God — Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — by con- 
gregations statedly assembling in His name. The 
conclusion then would be irresistible that there 
must have been once living such a body of believ- 
ing worshippers ; that, in other words, such an in- 
stitution as the Christian Church must have had its 
place in the actual history of the world. The book 
would be the palpable, demonstrative proof of the 
fact. 

Now take, in the light of this illustration, our 
possession and knowledge of the Bible. There has 
been, thank God, no destructive catastrophe to 
wipe out of our remembrance the history of the 
past ; the Book has never been lost, but has ever 
been kept sacredly in its recognized place of direc- 
tive authority in every stage of a steadily advancing 
historical progress. Therefore there is, for a de- 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BIBLICAL HISTOR 7. 37 

ductive conclusion, an incomparable advantage over 
the case of the Prayer- Book as supposed ; but with 
this advantage let the illustration be applied, and 
who can fail to see the pertinence and the force of 
it in the one case as in the other ? We have the 
Bible, this collection of books, in our hands. Its 
contents throughout show it to be, as its title im- 
plies, the Book of books. The first and oldest part 
of it is, on its face, a collection of historical records 
relating to a people who were, or at least supposed 
themselves to have been, specially selected by the 
Divine Creator of the world to be, above all other 
people, recipients of special revelations of His 
righteous will and government. This part of the 
Bible is neither a poem, like the " Iliad," nor an 
ideal creation, like Plato's " Republic, " nor a fic- 
titious tale, like a modern novel. It is plain his- 
tory, and that, not merely as historical narrative, 
but very much more — it is the essential embodi- 
ment of history. It is not only the story, but it is 
the charter of the nation. It includes its constitu- 
tion and its fundamental laws. It is the body of 
its authorized records ; the legislation, for both pres- 
ervation and permanent example, of its founders, 
of their principles and acts, and of the institutions, 
both political and ecclesiastical, which the nation 
had by inheritance from them. 



38 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BIBLICAL HISTOR Y. 

Passing on from this part of the Bible, we have, 
next, historical records of this people under the gov- 
ernment of kings and priests, in the line of direct 
and legitimate historical development. These 
books, too, are such in their very nature as to be 
demonstrative of the actual existence of such a 
people. 

If any explanation short of this could account for 
the existence of these portions of the Bible which 
are purely historical in purpose, no shade of doubt 
can be left when we take into account the later 
books, the Psalms and the Prophecies. These are 
the unquestionable formularies of real devotion and 
the sermons of real preachers. The books them- 
selves are all-sufficient evidence that there was a 
people who worshipped the God of their fathers 
after this manner, and to whom the rule of His 
commandments was the acknowledged law of right- 
eousness. 

The conclusion is even more decisively demon- 
strated in the New Testament. Here we have the 
most conclusive possible notes of the existence of 
such a people, with a constitution and habits of life 
which clearly mark them as lineal descendants of 
the people who lived under the Old Testament dis- 
pensation. Then, in the recorded birth of the Sav- 
iour, Jesus Christ, there is indeed a new and most 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BIBLICAL HISTOR Y, 39 

wonderful development, but it is a development per- 
fectly legitimate and entirely consistent with all the 
past history. His very lineage is traced carefully 
in the line of the house of David, and all His pecul- 
iar characteristics — all that marked Him as a per- 
sonage of unique nature and life — are scarcely more 
remarkable in themselves than in their accordance 
with the final purpose, in them made apparent, of 
all the past. The Mosaic history, with all its 
divinely ordained laws and institutions ; the devo- 
tional cultus of the Psalms ; the marvellous predic- 
tions and glorious promises of the prophets — all 
plainly and unmistakably culminate and have their 
perfect fulfilment in Him. And though it is true, 
as even sceptical candor has been constrained to 
acknowledge, that the consistent delineation of such 
a Personage by such writers as the four evangelists 
would be a greater miracle than any mighty thing 
which they have recorded of Him, and so the Gos- 
pels themselves are the most credibly veritable of all 
history ; yet, as if to seal the testimony beyond a 
possibility of reasonable question, the New Testa- 
ment canon is not closed until the new life has its 
consistent development in anew order, in which we 
have the germs, both doctrinal and institutional, of 
all Christian civilization, the primary examples of all 
that is best and truest in the world's history ever since. 



THE 

SUBSTANTIAL TRUTH OF BIBLICAL 

HISTORY NOT INVALIDATED BY 

"HIGHER CRITICISM." 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE SUBSTANTIAL TRUTH OF BIBLICAL HISTORY NOT 
INVALIDATED BY a HIGHER CRITICISM." 

There is a sense in which it is indisputably true 
that historical criticism may properly claim the 
right to treat the Bible as it does all other books. 
The books of the Bible are historical productions. 
They were severally written, at different dates, by 
human authors in the normal exercise of human in- 
telligence and thought. As so written they may 
and must be tested by the established rules of his- 
torical criticism, and there can be no valid objec- 
tion to the rigid application of these rules for the 
determination of questions relating to the genuine- 
ness, the authenticity, or the general credibility of 
any scriptural book, or of the Bible as a whole. 

Only, it would seem to be too clear for argument 
that a degree of reverence is due to the position of 
sacred authority which has been accorded to the 
Bible in all its parts for many ages, and that criti- 
cism should be scrupulously cautious in alleging 
mistakes or proposing corrections in it. It is not 
to ho presumed that the canon of inspired Scripture, 



44 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND " HIGHER CRITICISM.' 1 

either in the Jewish or Christian dispensation, was 
made up arbitrarily, carelessly, or ignorantly. 
Much less is it to be presumed that the recognition 
of a unique quality of Divine inspiration, which 
was the determining factor in the original forma- 
tion of the canon, and which has had the assured 
assent of men — the wisest and best, the purest, 
most thoughtful and intelligent almost without 
exception, of the most civilized — indeed, the only 
really civilized — peoples of the world for twenty 
centuries : it is not, we say, to be presumed that 
such recognition has been nothing better than a 
blunder of superstition. The only presumption in 
the case is, surely, that which takes in and duly 
accounts for all the facts in the history as well as 
the character of the Bible, and gives due weight to 
all the considerations which have so long combined 
to sanction its authority as settled in sound reason 
not less than in faith. 

In so far as the " higher criticism" of our time 
is open to the charge of a predisposition to disre- 
gard, and even to treat with supercilious contempt, 
all such considerations, it is not only, as it seems 
quite willing to be, offensive to Christian reverence, 
but untrue to its own principles as well ; since it is 
certain that genuine historical scholarship demands an 
impartial recognition of all the factors that have 



BIBLICAL HISTORY AND " HIGHER CRITICISM." 45 

combined to make up and determine any historical 
movement which may be under its survey. 

The present writer is quite content to leave to 
competent scholarship the settlement of all ques- 
tions which are raised in its own lines of investiga- 
tion, and has not the least fear that any article of 
religious faith which is worth conserving will be 
more than temporarily disturbed by thoroughly in- 
formed intelligence. But there are certain assump- 
tions just now current under the endorsement of 
" higher criticism" which are so evidently pre- 
judgments of determined scepticism, that they 
should be labelled as such at once. 

1. The first of these is the theory which boldly 
demands the displacement of the Biblical account 
of the Mosaic economy from its ages-long com- 
manding position in history, and relegates the en- 
tire record of the Divine legation of Moses to the 
realm of the purely legendary. 

The first argument on which this theory is based 
— viz., the assumed ignorance of writing on the 
part of Moses and his contemporaries and the eon- 
sequent non-existence of written historical docu- 
ments of any kind, or of any kind of literature in 
his day and long after — lias been conclusively dis- 
proved by Professor Savre in his recent hook on 

the "Higher Criticism and the Monuments," in 



46 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND " HIGHER CRITICISM." 

which he gives indisputable proof that long before 
the time of Moses there was in extensive and even 
popular circulation throughout the whole region 
between Babylonia and Egypt a body of literature, 
written on tablets of imperishable clay, and that 
for the safe-keeping of such tablets many noted 
libraries were in existence. 

A second argument would be inconclusive, even 
if its premise were granted — viz., that there is no 
evidence of the observance of the Mosaic institu- 
tions among the ancient Israelites for a long period 
— four or five centuries at least — after the time of 
Moses ; but the premise is not granted. The ex- 
treme meagreness of the records of the chosen peo- 
ple's history through all that long period must be 
taken into account, and no one can consider im- 
partially the evidences of the existence, and of rec- 
ognition by the people, of Mosaic institutions, which 
are found even in those records, as shown especially 
by Dr. Watts and Professor Bissell, without feeling 
that the assumption of their non-existence is de- 
cidedly unwarrantable. 

The assumption extends almost as sweepingly 
over four or five centuries more — even to the time 
of Josiah — by unqualifiedly pronouncing the books 
of Chronicles to have been worked up by a priestly 
party during the exile, and attributing to the pre- 



BIBLICAL HISTOBYAND " HIGHEB CBITICISM." 47 

exilic prophets ignorance of the entire Levitical 
system and opposition to the spirit of its require- 
ments. The theory is maintained here by simply 
throwing all the positive evidence against it bodily 
out of court, and it is in manifest contradiction to 
facts which it is compelled to admit as historically 
authenticated. For instance, there is no question 
that the Samaritans, in their alienated state after the 
exile, accepted the entire Pentateuch with venera- 
tion for its antiquity and Divine authority equal to 
that of their brethren in Judea. If, as this new 
theory claims, the Book of Deuteronomy only had 
been known before the exile, and that only under 
a doubtful claim of having been found by a priest 
in the time of Josiah, after having been lost for 
centuries, how is it possible to account for the ex- 
istence of the Samaritan Pentateuch, or to explain 
the Samaritans' acceptance of it and their adhesion 
to belief in its Mosaic authorship and Divine au- 
thority ? Again, it is agreed by all competent 
scholars that the language of the Pentateuch, and of 
Joshua as well, is not that of the exilic period, but 
archaic, and unquestionably classic in the Old Testa- 
ment history. Yet, again, the theory depends 
chiefly on the silence of the older Biblical records 
concerning any general or uniform observance of 
the Mosaic institutions in the pre-Davidic ages, and 



48 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND " HIGHER CRITICISM." 

even for the subsequent centuries before the exile. 
That point has been already referred to. But if the 
Levitical system was devised at the time and for 
the purpose which this theory alleges, is it possible 
to account for its character or for some of its lead- 
ing provisions any more than for its language ? 
The provisions for the temple- worship and sacrifices 
may be so explainable ; but what can be said of the 
elaborate provisions for the years of Sabbatical rest 
and the general readjustment of property owner- 
ship and new divisions of the land in the semi-cen- 
tennial jubilees ? " There is no evidence that these 
enactments ever went into practical effect." 
Granted as certainly true not only in the pre-exilic 
ages, but equally so in the subsequent period ; but 
the point is, and it is strengthened rather than weak- 
ened by this fact, is there any possible way to ac- 
count for its invention by the priests while in exile ? 
As an old provision in one of the Mosaic books it 
may be accounted for, even though there were no 
record of its consistent observance, or even though 
its provisions had been for the most part allowed to 
lapse into desuetude. But what conceivable motive 
could have prompted the priests in exile to put 
forth a claim for the ancient existence and Divine 
authorship of such a system ? Why should they 
have devised it ? What could have suggested its 



BIBLICAL HISTORY AND " HIGHER CRITICISM." 49 

provisions to them ? For wliat purpose and with 
what possible reason could they have thought of 
inducing their countrymen to adopt it on their re- 
turn to the Holy Land ? These and such questions 
are not to be superciliously put aside. They must 
be met and satisfactorily answered before the Bibli- 
cal history can be rewritten on the modern theory, 
and before the pretensions of this theory to scien- 
tific historical scholarship can be accepted as any- 
thing better than an unwarrantable assumption. 

II. While it is conceded even by the advanced 
school of sceptical critics that from the time of 
King David — about a thousand years before the 
Christian era — the Jewish people may be properly 
included within the scope of scientific history, it is 
claimed that the character of David has been so 
completely reversed in the traditional idea of him 
as to require the entire history to be rewritten. 

It is hardly necessary to state that the traditional 
ideal is that of a man not without faults, not free 
from at least one very heinous sin, but of excep- 
tional devoutness and spirituality of temper ; that 
as such he was recognized in his day as " a man 
after God's own heart ; ,? was chosen to be the 
founder of the elect dynasty, the lineal progenitor 
of the Incarnate Messiah ; was also inspired to be 
the author of many of the Psalms, and justly on 



50 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND " HIGHER CRITICISM." 

titled by his devout interest in the services of the 
sanctuary, as well as his musical skill and poetic 
inspiration, to be named the " sweet psalmist of 
Israel," and to have the entire collection of the 
Psalms published under his name. This, in brief, 
is the ideal of David and of his position in the Bible 
history, which has been traditionally accepted in all 
Christendom for nearly two thousand years, and in 
Judaism for a thousand years before its birth. 

Now it is proposed by such claimants to superior 
historical knowledge and critical insight as Renan, 
in France, Wellhausen, in Germany, and Kuenen 
and his reverend (!) followers, Drs. Oortand Hook- 
yos, in Holland, to dethrone this ideal, and to put 
in its place the image of a character so utterly 
diverse from it as to be its entire opposite in all 
moral and spiritual traits. David, as here por- 
trayed, so far from being eminently spiritually 
minded, was the " least religious" of all the Jew- 
ish leaders or rulers ; so far from being remarkable 
for his allegiance and devotion to Jehovah, was 
careless of all worship and ready to acknowledge 
for a purpose either Jehovah or Baal with equal 
indifference ; so far from having been an inspired 
Psalmist, he was simply a jovial minstrel who could 
sing a good song of love or war ; and so far from 
having been the author of most of the Psalms, it is 



BIBLICAL HISTORY AND " HIGHER CRITICISM." 51 

doubtful if he wrote or thought of writing even 
one of them. In his personal life he was, after his 
boyhood, of which nothing is known, first a dash- 
ing adventurer ; then a reckless brigand chief- 
tain ; and, finally, a brilliant soldier and triumphant 
king, as jovial as he was successful, and without 
conscience in the commission of the meanest treach- 
eries or the most flagrant crimes. These are the 
dark lines in which the portrait of David is drawn 
by the writers referred to, and with which the later 
history of the Old Testament dispensation is pro- 
posed to be colored and so entirely rewritten. 

Now, in the first place, it is to be noted that for 
a true estimation of both the character and relations 
of David there is no other source of knowledge 
than the Bible itself ; and therefore the eminent 
general knowledge of such writers gives them no 
advantage over those whose study and thought have 
been restricted to the sacred history alone. 

In the second place, it must be conceded that the 
traditionary ideal of David originated, not in the 
Biblical narrative, but in the actual life of which 
that narrative is but a record. So all historical 
ideals are formed. A man can become an historical 
personage only by having made his place in the his- 
torical movement of his nation and age, so as to be 
identified with it or with some phase of it. He is 



52 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND " HIGHER CRITICISM." 

thus in the public eye, and subject to the popular 
judgment, That judgment is never wrong, at least 
not in the main and on the whole. Therefore the 
recorded history, which is its photograph, may 
always be relied upon for indisputable accuracy, if 
not in every detail, yet at least in all that consti- 
tutes substantial truth. The ideal of David is trace- 
able to the same kind of root, and has attained its 
growth by precisely the same process and on pre- 
cisely the same principles that have characterized 
that of all other prominent personages in history. 
To say that the true ideal of David is the complete 
reverse of what it has been hitherto supposed to be 
is as preposterous as it would be to say that Charle- 
magne was a cowardly imbecile, Charles II. a saint, 
or Washington the counterpart of Nero. 

But the challenge having been so confidently put 
to the defenders of the traditionary ideal, there is a 
call for a reconsideration of the Old Testament 
admissions of faultiness in its favorite heroes, and 
particularly of faults in the character of David, to 
obviate an unjust impression of their true character 
and effect. 

In the first place, then, the observation which 
has been often made should be marked with new 
emphasis — viz., that while the Bible relates, without 
the least attempt at apology or extenuation, even 



BIBLICAL HISTORY AND "HIGHER CRITICISM." 53 

the worst faults of those whom in the main it most 
commends, it never commends the faults ; but, on 
the contrary, holds them up for the warning and 
admonition of its readers, and generally describes 
the punishment or the penitence which followed 
them. 

In the second place, it is clearly right that allow- 
ance should be made for the primitive age and dim 
ethical light in which the Old Testament heroes 
lived. The Old Testament history begins in the 
earliest, most primitive, and rudest age of the 
world ; and it was in such an age, or not very far 
advanced above it, that the persons lived in whose 
records we find serious moral blurs. In the days 
of Noah, of Abraham, of Lot, and of Jacob there 
had been no authoritative proclamation of the 
Divine law ; the voice of Jehovah had not been 
heard declaring in tones of thunder the moral obliga- 
tions of men. Doubtless, as all Christian believers 
hold, His good Spirit instructed them by His still, 
small voice, and to His instruction in their hearts, 
opening them to receive and enabling them to 
understand the few truths which had been tested in 
life or handed down as relics of primeval knowl- 
edge, they must have been indebted for all their 
conceptions of righteousness ; but it is obvious that 
knowledge in its crude elements, and with very 



54 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND " HIGHER CRITICISM." 

little discrimination of principles, was all that under 
such circumstances they could have attained. 

The age of David and Solomon was later, an age 
of much clearer light and higher privilege ; but 
the lines of moral discrimination, even in that age, 
were but dimly discerned. It was neither night 
nor day. The darkness of pagan barbarism had 
been dispelled, but the Sun of Righteousness had 
not yet dawned in His bright effulgence upon the 
world. The men of that generation had before 
them the tables of the Law, but they had not the 
spotless example or the perfect teachings of Christ. 
Superior, then, as their knowledge undoubtedly was 
to that of the ancient patriarchs, it was, as un- 
doubtedly, vastly inferior to that of the humblest 
child of God in the Church now. The Lord Him- 
self implicitly affirms this when He says that John 
the Baptist was greater than any of the prophets 
before him, and yet that the least in the kingdom 
of God is greater than he. 

If we would estimate rightly the character of 
God's ancient servants, we must bear this fact in 
mind, and make due allowance for it. The wonder 
then, perhaps, may be not that there were notable 
defects in them, but rather that they were, for the 
most part, so free from defect ; that when so little 
light seemed to be vouchsafed for the illumination 



BIBLICAL HI8T0RY AND " HIGHER CRITICISM:' 55 

of their path, they should have walked in it, on 
the whole, so uprightly, with so little of stumbling 
or turning aside. 

Besides this consideration, there is another which 
is very important, to be borne in mind — viz., the 
essential difference between the inspired biographies 
and others for which special inspiration is not 
claimed. The difference is this : Uninspired biog- 
raphies describe only the actions of their subjects, 
and ascribe those actions to the best motives which a 
favorable judgment suggests ; but the inspired 
biographies lay bare the most secret thoughts and 
intents of the heart, and thus show what the motives 
in every case really were. The former represent 
their subjects as they appeared in the sight of their 
fellow-men, but the latter represent their subjects 
as they appeared in the sight of God. 

Now we do not hesitate to confess our belief that 
there is no man, and that from the beginning of 
human history there never has been one, in whose 
life the Eye of Omniscience, taking in at one glance 
its whole extent and noting its every act, does not 
see stains of guilt as dark as any which lies upon 
the character of even the most faulty of God's an- 
cient servants. Who can look honestly into his 
own heart and fail to discover astounding depths 
of iniquity there ? What foul thoughts lurk in its 



56 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND "HIGHER CRITICISM." 

dark caverns and rise up when opportunity prompts 
to assert their dominating power — thoughts full of 
all uncleanness and maliciousness, fornication, adul- 
tery, wrath, revenge, murder ; are they not all 
there ? And has not every one sometimes cher- 
ished and indulged them ? They may not, indeed 
often the worst of them may never have ripened 
into action. Lack of opportunity, or the fear of 
consequences, or pride, or the final triumph of 
principle, may have kept them down ; but who has 
not felt them ? who is not stained with the guilt of 
them ? Such thoughts are not seen by other men. 
No one would have them seen or known for the 
world ; and yet they do really have place as essen- 
tial elements in the character, and in the Eye of 
Omniscience the guilt of them lies upon the soul. 
There is no one who has not cherished them at 
some time or other ; no one probably who has not 
on some occasion admitted one or another of them 
among the motives of his action. It may even have 
happened that some of our actions which have been 
applauded, or would have been if seen by others, as 
eminently good, have really been for this reason, 
because springing from such motives, exceedingly 
vile. 

The true claim, then, for the biographies of the 
Old Testament Scriptures is that they are true to 



BIBLICAL HISTORY AND "HIGHER CRITICISM." 57 

human nature, in that they portray not only the 
acts of their subjects and ascribe them to the best 
motives which the judgment of charity will permit, 
but lay bare, as with the finger of the Omniscient 
Judge, the secret thoughts and intents of their 
hearts, and show accurately how those thoughts de- 
veloped into action and shaped the life. And the 
difficulty which we have in passing our human 
judgment upon the true relative standing of such 
characters as are portrayed in the Bible is a diffi- 
culty of personal experience — a difficulty which has 
its application to the inmost secrets of our own 
hearts no less than to the records of the Book which 
claims for its Author Him by whom the heart is 
thoroughly known. 

There can be no possible doubt of the thorough- 
ness of such disclosure in the Bible record of the 
life and character of David. Every act and inci- 
dent in his career, from young manhood to old age 
and the final end, is included in it and fully re- 
lated. His every fault, his every foible is search - 
ingly exposed. There is in his biographers an equal 
readiness to put him into the light of the most 
translucent scrutiny when deserving of disesteem 
for indiscretions, blame for follies and faults, and 
even deep condemnation for heinous sin, as when 
most exemplarily fulfilling the high ideal of the 



58 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND " HIGHER CRITICISM/' 

" man after God's own heart ;" and by his heroic 
magnanimity, his unequalled fervency of devo- 
tional sentiment, and unparalleled zeal in the ser- 
vice and for the honor of God, justifying the high 
estimation in which he is represented as standing 
before God and men. 

The record of his great crime — the crime which, 
in our sight, casts its dark shadow over his whole 
career, and so terribly baffles our capabilities of just 
discrimination in weighing his character — makes its 
exposure as searching, as unreserved, as thorough 
as can be conceived to be possible even in the final 
Judgment Day. From the first instigation of lust 
by a casual glance, through every stage of its 
secretly cherished development, and by every step 
that was taken for its unhallowed gratification, even 
to the final culmination in a deed of direful and 
damnable wickedness, the entire transaction is laid 
open, and every secret in it, as seen by the eye of 
God Himself, is unreservedly brought out into a 
thorough exposure of its criminal blameworthiness. 

But it is a very significant fact that David's sense 
of guilt in the case, according to the same record, 
was extremely imperfect ; so much so, that his 
conscience appears to have been entirely easy until 
his righteous instincts were roused by JSTathan's 
parable of the man who had robbed his neighbor of 



BIBLICAL HISTORY AND "HIGHER CRITICISM:' 59 

his one ewe lamb, and guilt similar to that of such 
a deed was charged directly upon David by the 
prophet's declaration, " Thou art the man." It 
would be incredible that one living in our time and 
under our degree of moral light could have been so 
insensible of guilt in the commission of such an act. 
But we must remember, as already observed, how 
imperfectly the lines of moral discrimination had 
been drawn in the time of David, and to this con- 
sideration we must add another which is of great 
weight in the case — viz. , the fact that the right of 
an Oriental monarch to the persons and lives of 
his subjects, with scarcely any limit of accounta- 
bility^ was then universally admitted. The true 
reading of the case then comes out, and the moral 
insensibility of David in this instance stands for us 
as a very notable example of an imperfect stage in 
the education of the human conscience, and it also 
affords a very striking proof, additional to many 
others, that the prophetic sense of righteousness in 
the Old Testament economy was derived from in- 
spirations of a Spirit of holiness infinitely superior 
to any possible instinct or impulse of the Zeitgeist 
of that age. 

Our conclusion, then, must be that the entire 
record of the life of David presented in the Old 
Testament justifies the traditionary ideal of him, 



60 BIBLICAL HIS TOBY AND " HIGHEB CBITICISM." 

since we have therein an eminent example of one 
living in an age of crude ethical discrimination, 
and not superior to it in his natural perceptions, 
yet of remarkable genius for spiritual insight and 
poetic expression ; of extraordinary capability for 
heroic achievement ; of magnanimous impulses and 
of great personal magnetism, chosen by Divine 
grace for special instruction and inspiration, by the 
guidance of which he was brought to see himself 
with an insight more nearly Divine, and became a 
preacher of righteousness not only for his own gen- 
eration, but for all time. While the Book of 
Psalms has for many generations borne his name, 
it has never been supposed, even in " traditional 
orthodoxy," to have been originally composed in 
its entirety by him. Many of the psalms have 
from the first been plainly ascribed in their very 
titles to other authors ; and it is a fair subject for 
critical investigation whether the greater part of 
the psalms, or even a very large proportion of them, 
were his personal composition. But whatever may 
be the final result of such investigation, it is not to 
be decided by offhand objections to the traditional 
authorship, much less by wholesale claims to nine- 
teenth century infallibility in determining exactly 
by its microscopic critical sagacity the original au- 
thorship, motive, and age of every word of the 



BIBLICAL HISTOBY AND " HIGHER CBITICISM." 61 

Psalms, or indeed of any part of the Bible. Cer- 
tainly, the reasons which have thus far been ad- 
duced in the processes of " higher criticism" are 
not sufficient for reasonable doubt, much less for 
denial, that the traditionary ascription of the author- 
ship of many of the psalms to David was made 
rightly and on valid ground in the first place, or 
that his extraordinary spiritual insight and poetic 
skill, combined with his eminent opportunity for 
ordering the psalmody of the sanctuary, were an 
ample justification for publishing the entire collec- 
tion of the inspired psalms under his name. 

That the fifty-first psalm was originally an ex- 
pression of his sense of personal guilt, when his 
conscience had been quickened after his great sin, 
has never been doubted until very recently ; and 
much more conclusive reasons than those which 
criticism has yet adduced must be given before his 
authorship of it can be pronounced disproved. As 
the Psalm of Penitence, what an inspiration it has 
been ! what an uplift it has given ! what relief it 
has afforded ! what light it has brought to myriads 
of sin-stained and burdened souls in every genera- 
tion since his time ! Who can doubt the genuine- 
ness of the penitence which found its expression in 
such language ? Who can wonder that the prophet 
of the compassionate God who willeth not the death 



62 BIBLICAL HISTORY AND "HIGHER CRITICISM." 

of a sinner, but had rather that he would turn and 
live, after having brought him to see and acknowl- 
edge the iniquity of his sin by the convicting charge, 
" Thou art the man^ was also authorized to make 
to him the gracious announcement, " The Lord 
hath put away thy sin /" 



THE INSPIRATION OF THE OLD 
TESTAMENT HISTORY. 



CHAPTER V, 

THE INSPIRATION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY. 

It should be distinctly observed that the assump- 
tions discussed in the last chapter are not those of 
higher criticism in any proper sense of the words. 
They are simply, as already said, assumptions of 
predetermined scepticism. The legitimate work of 
higher criticism is not here questioned. The 
scholarship which leaves no secret of the past un- 
discovered and counts nothing too remote to be 
investigated is worthy of all honor. It is especially 
worthy of honor when it is the result of lifelong 
study devoted patiently and reverently to the in- 
vestigation of the historical origin of the books 
which have come to us under a unique claim to 
Divine inspiration, and to a thorough analysis of 
the process by which this claim has been authenti- 
cated and sealed. But it is not superstition, it is 
simply truth of feeling and perception, which rec- 
ognizes the ground thus trodden as holy ground, 
and a spirit of profound reverence is surely a be- 
coming — shall we not say an indispensable ? — quali- 
fication for any one who assumes for himself the 



66 INSPIRA TION OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTOB T. 

place of an expert to survey it and determine its 
value. Entirely aside from any claim for such rev- 
erence, which may be made on the score of religion, 
it is as indispensably essential in a true historical 
spirit ; and equally indispensable would seem to be 
a combination of both historical and spiritual in- 
sight, to perceive and feel in their true relations all 
the factors in its original consecration, and which, 
in legitimate evolution, have secured its recognition 
as sacred ground ever since. Criticism, when 
rooted and grounded in such scholarship and main- 
tained in such spirit, may legitimately raise many 
questions and suggest many points for reconsider- 
ation ; and there is no danger that the foundations 
of faith will be undermined or seriously disturbed. 
Whatever reasons for doubt concerning the au- 
thorship or original date of any part of the sacred 
Scriptures may be found by such reverent and 
scholarly criticism, this much for the substantial 
historical veracity of the Old Testament may be 
considered as settled beyond possible controversy : 
that it is, as a whole, absolutely demonstrative in 
evidence of the existence, in the early ages of the 
world's history to which its records belong, of a 
people who were, or at least supposed themselves 
to be, under an economy of special covenant with 
God, and, as such, made recipients of special reve- 



INSPIRA TION OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTOR ¥.67 

lation of His nature and will. To our personal 
faith there is no need of the qualifying clause — 
" or at least supposed themselves to be" — in this 
proposition ; for, to our mind, the proof is conclu- 
sive that the supposition was firmly grounded in 
fact. But leaving such proof out of present view, 
it may confidently be asserted that the proposition 
as it stands is indisputable. 

Taking, then, the existence of such a people in 
the past as an assured historical fact, there can be 
no question of the importance of determining, if we 
may, whence the belief that they had been singled 
out for such an economy originated ; how it must 
have affected their national consciousness ; and 
how it did, in fact, differentiate them from the 
rest of the world, making them both in conscious- 
ness and fact " a peculiar people !" 

It will not do, as Renan and others of like scepti- 
cal temper have done, to say that their belief con- 
cerning their relation to the Deity was simply their 
national phase of a common superstition in their 
time ; that Jehovah — or, more properly, Yah veil — 
was simply their name for the Divine Being whom 
they supposed to be their local or national guardian 
among the celestial powers. It will not do because 
it is not true. It is not consistent with a fair ac- 
ceptance of historical evidence or an honest inter- 



68 INSP1BATI0N OF OLD TESTAMENT H1ST0BT. 

pretation of historical documents. Nothing in his- 
tory can be more certain and nothing more indis- 
putable than the fact that the revelation of Jehovah, 
as represented in the Bible to have been made to 
the Jewish people and received by them, was a rev- 
elation of God as the absolutely Supreme God of 
the universe, the only Living and True God, 
whose perfectly righteous sovereignty is over all 
from the beginning, and who will not divide His 
glory with another. This is the doctrine, not of 
one leader, but of every one in ancient Judea — of 
lawgiver, prophet, priest, psalmist, poet, and moral- 
ist alike ; not of one stage in their historic evolu- 
tion, but of every stage, from the earliest beginning 
of their recorded history to the very end. 

Now the Hebraic conception of God stands abso- 
lutely alone in ancient history. No trace of such a 
conception can be found in the literary or monu- 
mental remains of any other ancient people. The 
Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and others are 
clearly proved, by modern discoveries, to have 
been not devoid of religious faith or unaccustomed 
to the expression of religious sentiments and affec- 
tions in appropriate acts of devotional worship ; 
but the god of their worship is always found to be 
a local divinity. Their piety never gets beyond 
the conception of God as the tutelary divinity of 



INSPIRATION OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY. 69 

the nation. A slight trace of faith in God as the 
Supreme Being has, indeed, been thought to be 
indicated in the name which stood for the father of 
gods and men, in both the ancient and the classic 
mythologies ; but we look in vain for influential 
tokens of such faith in the national consciousness, 
or proofs of it in their actual history. 

It is only in ancient Israel that we do find it, and 
there it is fundamental and everywhere dominant. 
Whether in the prophetic or the Mosaic or even the 
patriarchal eras, the characteristic mark of this his- 
tory, its inspiring principle, we might even say, the 
very reason of its being, is faith in God, the Supreme 
Being, Creator, and Ruler of the universe. The 
foundation source of all their knowledge was the 
sublime sentence, " In the beginning God created 
the heavens and the earth." If their father Abra- 
ham was believed to have been selected by special 
Divine favor, and taken into a special covenanted 
relationship with God, it is by the same only Su- 
preme God, maintaining the same sole sovereignty 
over all the nations of the earth, that this covenant 
economy was understood to have been constituted. 
" When Abraham was ninety years old and nine, 
the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, I am Hod 
Almighty ; walk before Me, and be thou perfect. 
And 1 will make My covenant between Me and 



70 INSPIBA TION OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTOR Y. 

thee, and will multiply thee exceedingly. . . . Be- 
bold, My covenant is with thee, and thou shalt be 

THE FATHER OF A MULTITUDE OF NATIONS. Neither 

shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy 
name shall be Abraham ; for the father of a multi- 
tude of nations have 1 made thee."* And yet 
again, " The angel of the Lord called unto Abra- 
ham a second time out of heaven, and said, By 
Myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, . . . that in 
blessing 1 will bless thee, and in multiplying I will 
multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as 
the sand which is upon the sea-shore ; and thy seed 
shall possess the gate of his enemies ; and in thy 
seed shall all the nations of the earth be bless- 
ed, "f If it was believed that a still further and 
much fuller revelation of G-od was made to Moses 
five centuries later, under a new name, there was 
no thought of any other than the One Supreme 
God as the Author of this revelation, and the new 
name was not for a moment understood to denote 
another god, but only to betoken the heritage of 
special grace, into which the seed of Abraham were 
now admitted under a national constitution and 
government of laws which Moses was authorized to 
establish and promulgate. 

* Gen. 17 : 2-5, Revised Version, 
f Gen. 22 : 16-18, Revised Version. 



INSPIRA TION OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTOR Y. 71 

" And God said unto Moses, 1 am that I am : 
and He said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children 
of Israel . . . The Lord, the God of your fathers, 
the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, 
hath sent Me unto you : this is My name forever, 
and this is My memorial unto all generations. Go, 
and gather the elders of Israel, and say unto them, 
The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of 
Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, hath appeared 
unto me, saying, I have surely visited you, and 
seen that which is done to you in Egypt ; and 1 
have said, I will bring you up out of the affliction 
of Egypt unto the land of the Canaanite, and the 
Hittite, and the Amorite, and the Perizzite, and 
the Hivite, and the Jebusite, unto a land flowing 
with milk and honey. "* " And God spake unto 
Moses, and said unto him, I am Jehovah : and I 
appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto 
Jacob, as God Almighty, but by My name Jehovah 
I was not known to them. . . . Wherefore say 
unto the children of Israel, 1 am Jehovah, and 1 
will bring you out from under the burdens of the 
Egyptians, and I will rid you out of their bondage, 
and 1 will redeem you with a stretched out arm, 
and with great judgments : and I will take you to 

* Ex. 3 : 14-18. 



72 IJSfSPIBA TION OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTOR Y. 

Me for a people, and I will be to you a God : and 
ye shall know that I am Jehovah your God, which 
bringeth you out from under the burdens of the 
Egyptians. And I will bring you in unto the land, 
concerning which I lifted up My hand to give it to 
Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob ; and I will give 
it to you for an heritage : I am Jehovah."* 

Whatever may be the final conclusion of criticism 
concerning the true date of the original composition 
of the Pentateuch, or any part of it, will not alter 
or disprove the fact that when the religious faith 
and worship of the nation is determinable by the 
canons even of criticism itself, its relation to God 
as the Supreme Being is found to be in exact ac- 
cordance with these expressions ; nor only this, but 
with a tradition settled and unquestioningly ac- 
cepted, that such had been its relation from the 
first, and was then determined by revelation, as here 
recorded. 

The prophets not only called upon the people, 
constantly and with every form of emphatic speech, 
for devoted allegiance to the worship and service 
of Jehovah as God Most High, Almighty in uni- 
versal sovereignty, but appealed without admission 
of possible doubt to their own consciences for recog- 

* Ex. 6 : 3-8, Revised Version. 



INSPIRA TIOJST OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTOR Y. 73 

nition of the peculiar obligation to such allegiance, 
which the recorded special revelations had held the 
nation to from the very beginning. It was suffi- 
cient for them to appeal to the religious conscious- 
ness of the people, traceable to this original inspira- 
tion ; and the charge that they were untrue to it 
was the most convicting reproof which the prophetic 
zeal for purity of faith and worship could allege 
against their idolatrous propensities. Indeed, the 
very fact that idolatry was accounted a sin in Israel 
was in itself a proof of their admitted obligation to 
the worship and service of God as God alone. The 
nations around them having gods many and lords 
many might, without blame or inconsistency, join 
with one another when in friendly alliance in the 
religious rites supposed to be pleasing to their sev- 
eral national divinities, and any one of them might 
admit into its pantheon the god or gods of a sub- 
jugated people among the other legitimate fruits of 
conquest, their theory being that the tutelary divin- 
ity of their own nation was proved by the victorious 
result to be stronger, but not therefore more divine 
than the god or gods of the nation which had been 
compelled to yield to its sway. But in Israel there 
was never for a moment an allowed acceptance of 
the heathen faith or worship. From the iirst it 
was fixed in the national consciousness that every 



74 INSPIRATION OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY. 

species or form of idolatrous worship was a deadly 
sin , which Jehovah could not look upon with the 
least degree of allowance. It is admitted, even by 
the critics who would be most disposed to minimize 
any fundamental distinction between the religious 
attitude of Israel and that of other ancient nations, 
that "Israel had no mythology," and that "we 
have neither the slightest trace in Israel of Jeho- 
vah's being regarded as a primus inter pares, nor 
of His having a consort, as Baal had in Astarte."* 
The fundamental law of faith and worship for all 
Israel was ever that which was held to have been 
given as the first commandment of Revelation : 
" I am the Lord thy God, and thou shalt have none 
other gods but Me." 

In this respect Israel stood always and every- 
where a nation apart. It always had and never lost 
this characteristic and fundamental distinction from 
all the rest of the world. On the common ground 
of historical life the lot of Israel seems to have had 
no special advantages ; it was simply that of one of 
the smaller nations of the world, such as the Am- 
monites or Moabites, and its people had to experi- 
ence the common vicissitudes of historical develop- 
ment. They might associate and mingle with other 

* Stade, as quoted by Professor Robertson, " Early Religion 
of Israel," p. 299. 



INSPIRA TION OF OLD TESTAMENT HIS TOM Y. 75 

people in commercial intercourse or political alli- 
ances ; they might be " scattered and peeled" 
among nations foreign and even hostile to all their 
customary ways ; might, at times, be almost lost in 
the absorbing pressure of such foreign life, with all 
its influences ; but this one characteristic they never 
lost : the God of their fathers ever remained, in 
their faith and worship, the only Lord God, and to 
acknowledge any other being in all the universe as 
God beside Him was but idolatry, the most heinous 
and degrading of deadly sins. 

This, then, is the fact which demands acceptance, 
and requires to be accounted for. The " critical" 
theory, though compelled to accept, does not ac- 
count for it. It is not theory, however, but histori- 
cal fact with which we are concerned here ; and it 
is fact indisputable on the accepted principles of 
historic certitude that the Hebrew monotheism had 
this unique character and attitude in contradistinc- 
tion from the theism of every other nation in the 
Old World. 

This characteristic, it is to be carefully observed, 
was not only their belief in the Divine oneness and 
universal supremacy, but also in the essential, uni- 
versal, and undeviating righteousness of the Divine 
Being and government. The gods of the nations 
were, for the most part, as enormous in their pas- 



76 INSPIEA TION OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTOB Y. 

sions as in their strength. The theistic conception 
of paganism everywhere was almost devoid of the 
ethical element. Its deities were supposed to be 
good to their devotees, and were therefore wor- 
shipped ; but their goodness was not that of essen- 
tial virtue, but simply special kindness to their 
favorites. The most monstrous and atrocious vices 
were attributed to them without the least thought 
of inconsistency. And so, even in their worship, 
rites of impure and debasing lust had their place, 
and the foulest wickedness in the worshippers was 
not supposed to lessen in the least the favorable 
acceptance of them in the sight of their god. 

But the Hebraic conception of God was essen- 
tially and fundamentally ethical. The perfect 
righteousness, the absolute and undeviating holi- 
ness of Jehovah was a truth as fundamental in the 
national consciousness as His universal sovereignty. 
To say that holiness was in the Hebrew mind a rec- 
ognized characteristic of Jehovah would be a very 
feeble assertion of the fact. It was recognized not 
only as a characteristic, but as an essential attribute, 
eternally identical with His very nature. No shade 
of iniquity could be possibly associated with Him. 
In Himself and in all His manifestations and ad- 
ministrative acts He was the very ideal, essentially 
and eternally, of perfect righteousness. And con- 



INSPIRATION OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY. 77 

sistently in all His requirements, " Be ye holy, for 
I am holy," was the recognized fundamental con- 
dition of acceptance In His sight, whether for wor- 
ship or for conduct in all the actions and intercourse 
of daily living. 

There can be no question that in holding and 
maintaining this exalted conception of the nature 
and character of God, ancient Israel stood absolutely 
alone among all the nations of the Old World. It 
was by this peculiarity of their theistic faith that 
they were kept ever, in every vicissitude of their 
national history, a " separate and peculiar people," 
irreconcilably separate in all their religious devo- 
tions, and peculiar in the maintenance of at least an 
ideal standard of immeasurable superiority in prac- 
tical ethics, even though their attainment was con- 
fessedly short of it to a grievous extent in actual 
personal living. 

Now the problem which an honest student of his- 
tory has no right to evade is how to account for 
this unique characteristic. The question to be an- 
swered is, Where did Israel get this grand theistic 
conception ? May we not say rather, Whence and 
how came to Israel this knowledge of God ! this 
true knowledge — knowledge which has been verified 
ami confirmed in all human civilization, concerning 
the nature and will of the Almighty Father, by 



78 INSPIRATION OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTOR F. 

whom this world and all worlds have been created 
and are governed. 

It is a favorite theory of some among those who 
profess to be " higher critics," that in its theism, 
as in all other respects, the Hebrew history was, 
like other histories, simply an evolutionary develop- 
ment. They tell us that in the early days, and even 
down to the time of the prophets, the Israelites 
were, in their religious ideas and practices, very 
much like the other small nations of Palestine, 
such as the Ammonites and Moabites ; their God, 
Tahveh, being to them very much what Moloch 
and Chemosh were to these neighboring peoples, 
except that Yahveh was more selfish in his local 
favoritism than either of these other deities, and 
that the higher conception was a later evolution in 
their theistic history. When we ask for the causal 
influence of this particular development in Israel, 
and why nothing like it is found in the neighboring 
nations, the only answer given is that it is traceable 
to no special influence, unless it be to a special 
genius for religion, which the Israelites seem to 
have had and the others lacked. Why even this 
peculiar genius should have taken such an immeas- 
urably exalted leap after ages of national training 
in low and base superstition, and at a time when 
they had reached a stage of their history most de- 



INSPIBA TION OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTOB T. 79 

pressed, there is no reason given by that class of 
these critics who take pure evolutionism for the 
only law of historical progress. Others, however, 
seem to themselves to find the sufficient cause in 
the preaching and writing just at this point of the 
religious teachers who were known as the prophets ; 
but here again the proposed explanation signally 
fails to explain. The ethic monotheism of Israel is 
carefully labelled " the prophetic conception ;" 
but special Divine revelation to the prophets being 
at the same time as carefully denied, and the rec- 
ords of the preceding Mosaic and Abrahamic revela- 
tions entirely rejected, it is impossible to see whence 
the prophets got their conception, or by what influ- 
ence they were inspired ; if, indeed, their inspira- 
tion in any true sense can be admitted. 

Now it is certain that the only historical docu- 
ments, or records claiming to be historical, which 
we have as bearing upon this point, are those which 
are contained in the Old Testament. It is equally 
certain that the explanation which they afford is, 
in contrast with any such hypothesis, entirely suffi- 
cient, leaving ground for no other possible question 
than that if they be historically true. This explana- 
tion, which, however, it should be distinctly ob- 
served, appears in the sacred volume not in the 
form of an explanation, but simply of historical 



80 INSPIRATION OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY, 

record, is that the Hebrew conception of God was 
specially inspired by direct revelation from God 
Himself ; that such revelation was made, first, to 
the founder patriarch, Abraham, at a later age to 
Moses, and afterward to the other prophetic leaders 
and teachers of the nation. It is unquestionable 
that this explanation, as we have it, has the form 
and character of historical narrations. And since 
the question at issue is an historical one, this is not 
to be overlooked. The " critic" who claims to 
have found a sufficient explanation of this unique 
conception of the Divine nature and government 
by pronouncing it an invention of " the prophets," 
may reasonably be asked why " the prophets" 
should have put forth their invention in writings 
purporting to be the documentary annals and laws 
of the nation from its very foundation, centuries 
before their time ? Nor only this, but to have 
made the appeals which they undeniably did make 
to the national consciousness for verification and 
acknowledgment of the historical truth of their 
claim that Jehovah, the Lord God Almighty, had, 
through all the nation's history, been known to be 
the only living and true God ; and to have put the 
charge directly and boldly to the conscience of 
every individual in the nation, that the Israelites 
were false to their own traditions and their lifelong 



INSPIRA TIOJST OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTOR Y. 81 

religious convictions in recognizing any being as 
Divine but Jehovah alone ? How could the proph- 
ets have expected that such an appeal and such a 
charge would be accepted by the people ? And 
how is it possible to explain the indubitable fact 
that they were so accepted, if the Jehovah of the 
prophets were not recognized and acknowledged by 
the people as none other God than He unto whom 
alone they and their fathers had always been taught 
to render worship and service ? 

These questions do not touch the literary details 
with which linguistic scholarship may legitimately 
occupy itself. The objections against the so-called 
" critical" theory of the Israelite history does not 
require an insistence upon the historical accuracy 
(in accordance with our modern historic sense) of 
every part of the Pentateuch or other pre-prophetic 
books of the Old Testament as we now have them. 
But they do call for an honest application of the 
admitted principles of historical science to that his- 
tory, and in such application seem to leave no room 
for any other conclusion than that of the assured 
admission of the substantial truth of the Biblical 
records. 

It is a late age to ask, as if the question were a 
new one, in precisely what way do these records 
represent the revelation to have been made ? But 



82 INSPIRATION OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY. 

there are pressing reasons in our time for consider- 
ing this question with renewed interest, and there 
are some peculiar advantages in its scientific attain- 
ments for a discriminating consideration of the sub- 
ject which have been wanting in any previous age. 
Particularly is this true because of its advances in 
physiological and psychological knowledge, as well 
as of its explorations in the fields of archaeology 
and history. In all ages, from the very first, it has 
been held to be the fundamental truth of the case 
that the special revelation of God consisted in a 
direct communication from God Himself to the 
chosen human recipient ; that this was true alike in 
relation to Abraham and Moses as to the prophets. 
But possibly it has not been sufficiently noted, or not 
noted with sufficiently discriminating emphasis, that 
the Biblical records describe each of such special 
Divine manifestations as having been made in a 
different way. To Abraham it is stated that the 
Lord appeared and talked with him ; once u ia a 
vision ;"* but repeatedly by " coming and stand- 
ing before" him. To Moses, while the statement 
is made again and again that the Lord " spake 
unto" him and " said" the words which are re- 
corded, yet that in the first revelation to him the 

* Gen. 15 : 1. 



INSPIRA TIOJST OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTOR T. 83 

Divine manifestation was by a flame of fire in a 
bush that was not consumed, and a Voice calling 
out of the bush to him by name and declaring, " I 
am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, 
the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob ;" yet 
charging him when he turned aside to see God, 
" Draw not nigh hither : put off thy shoes from off 
thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy 
ground."* 

And many years afterward, long after Moses had 
become familiar with Divine communications, and 
it had even been said that " the Lord spake unto 
Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his 
friend,"f it is yet recorded;}: that the Lord said 
unto him, " Thou canst not see My face : for man 
shall not see Me, and live," and that he was only 
permitted, as a very gracious response to his most 
earnest and persistent entreaty that he might see 
God, to behold not His "face," but only His 
" back ;" and that only after special preparation, 
by being put for protection in a cleft of a rock and 
covered with the Divine § hand. To the prophets 
the Divine communications came " at sundry times 
and in divers manners." To Samuel, in a dream 
of the night ;|| to Elijah, by a " still, small voice \ %m \ 

* Ex. 3 : 1-6. f Ex. 33 : 11. \ Id. vs. 20. 

§ Ex. 33 : 20-23. || 1 Sam. 3 : 1-10. T 1 Kings 19 ; VI. 



84 INSPIRA TION OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTOR Y. 

to Zechariah, by " the angel of the Lord ;"* to 
Jeremiah, by a vision in which the Lord " put forth 
His hand"f and touched the prophet's mouth ; to 
Ezekiel, by " visions of God," in which he saw the 
" heavens opened'' and the " appearance of the 
likeness of the glory of God ;"J to Isaiah, by a 
" vision," in which he " saw the Lord sitting upon 
a throne, high and lifted up, and His train filled 
the temple. Above Him stood the seraphism : 
each one had six wings ; with twain He covered 
His face, and with twain he covered His feet, and 
with twain He did fly. And one cried unto an- 
other, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of 
hosts : the whole earth is full of His glory ;"§ to 
Hosea and other prophets in such wise that the 
message which they severally proclaimed might be 
affirmed without a doubt on their part to be " the 
word of the Lord," yet with no explanation of 
either the manner in which the revelation was made 
or the tokens by which its Divine origin was assured. 
Now, in considering these various descriptions of 
the manner or manners in which it pleased God to 
communicate with His chosen prophets by special 
revelation, we must bear in mind that they were 
written many ages before the birth of all that is 

* Zech. 1:9. f Jer. 1 : 1-10. % Ezek « ch - * and 10 - 

§ Isa. 6 : 1-4. 



INSPIRA TIOJST OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTOR Y. 85 

known to us as modern science. The wisest men 
of that period knew almost nothing of natural forces 
or laws ; they had only the scantiest and crudest 
knowledge or conception of natural elements ; they 
had not learned the distinction between processes 
or effects which are material and those which are 
purely spiritual. Obviously, then, they had in 
their speech no terms to express such distinction, 
and of necessity must, in describing either the one 
or the other, have used terms which to us are con- 
fusing and very hard to analyze. When we try to 
get from them a true conception of the precise way 
in which the Divine revelation in any case was 
made, we need to free our minds, as far as possible, 
from the limitations of their terms of literal de- 
scription, and reach for their meaning by an earnest 
and persistent endeavor to put ourselves in mental 
attitude as nearly as we may in their place. In 
this attitude, one point which has not been suffi- 
ciently regarded in many theories which have been 
and still are held concerning both revelation and 
inspiration should be clearly understood as funda- 
mental — that is, the absolute prohibition in Hebrew 
law of any formal representation of Jehovah, or 
the thought of any possible likeness to Him in the 
image of any person or thing in the created uni- 
verse. Therefore, when Moses and the other 



86 INSPIRATION OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY, 

prophets use anthropomorphic terms in recording 
Divine revelations, when they speak of God as 
" seen" by them in the form of man or angel, and 
of God as " coming" to them, " standing" by 
them, " putting His hand" upon them, and " talk- 
ing with" them, "face to face," it is certain that 
they used these terms only because they had no 
other for either their own idea or the apprehension 
of their contemporaries, in designating the fact of 
a Divine revelation as having been made to them. 
They " saw" God most certainly, and " heard His 
voice ;" but it was with the mind's eye that they 
saw and with the mind's ear that they heard ; and 
this they knew as well as we. But the distinction 
was understood by them implicitly rather than ex- 
plicitly, because neither in their speech nor their 
philosophy had the terms of the distinction between 
physical and mental action been apprehensively 
enunciated or formulated. 

This limitation of their capability of expression, 
however, does not detract in the least from the 
historical truth of what they certainly intended to 
relate — viz., that the chosen leaders of Israel did 
receive special revelations by direct communica- 
tion from God Himself, in which He quickened 
their spiritual apprehension with such a per- 
ception of His glory in the perfection of holiness 



INSP1RA TION OF OLD TESTAMENT HI8T0R Y. 87 

as had never been granted to mortal on earth be- 
fore. 

This is the fundamental fact in the history of 
ancient Israel, and without the admission and rec- 
ognition of it there is no possibility of accounting 
for the unique attitude and character of that nation 
in the history of the world. From first to last the 
obligation because of it to worship and serve Jeho- 
vah as the only living and true God was the con- 
trolling principle of the Hebrew national life. It 
is, indeed, to be admitted that both the rulers and 
the people of the nation were in many instances 
false to their elected position ; that there was a be- 
setting fascination for them in the lustful indul- 
gences of idolatry, to which the surrounding and at 
times commingling peoples were addicted. But 
they do not seem ever to have entirely lost the con- 
sciousness of their election, much less to have de- 
nied or doubted the fact of Jehovah's revelation of 
His power and Godhead to their fathers. To this 
consciousness the prophets uniformly appealed with- 
out the least apparent apprehension ever that the 
appeal would not meet with a response of spontane- 
ous assent. Their call upon Israel was never in 
behalf of a religion that was in any sense or degree 
a new religion to them, but always and without 
qualification for allegiance to the God of their 



88 INSPIRATION OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY. 

fathers, the God who, from the time of their fathers, 
had been known as the God of Abraham, of Isaac, 
and of Jacob, the God by whose sovereign author- 
ity Moses had proclaimed : " Hear, O Israel, the 
Lord our God is one Lord," and whom from the 
earliest consciousness of their individual lives they 
had known and worshipped as the only living and 
true God. 

The history of ancient Israel, then, was demon- 
strably attested as an inspired history throughout, 
its inspiration being traceable for its original source 
to direct revelation from the Infinite Creator and 
Ruler of the world. It is true to say that the his- 
tory was inspired, for its entire movement was actu- 
ated and dominated by the principles of faith and 
devotion toward Jehovah as the revealed God of 
the universe. The least that can be said of the Old 
Testament records is that they are substantially his- 
torical, and this can mean nothing less than that 
they are substantially true. 

It has been believed for many centuries, in both 
Christendom and Judaism, that the Biblical books, 
which are in part the historical records and in part 
expressions of the devotional life of ancient Israel, 
and which, as a whole, constitute its collected and 
accredited literature, were productions of authors 
who wrote them under a special kind of inspira- 



INSP1RA TION OF OLD TESTAMENT HIS TOR Y. 89 

tion. Many have held this point of faith, as if it 
must necessarily include the opinion that these 
writers were exclusively inspired, and so inspired 
only or chiefly for the very purpose of writing these 
books. But there is no substantial basis for this 
theory. The prophets and psalmists were undoubt- 
edly men whose spiritual life was on the mountain- 
top of inspiration ; above all others in the nation 
they had an assured consciousness of living com- 
munion with the living God. Therefore it is clear 
that they must have enjoyed the highest degree of 
inspiration, and there can be no doubt that, through 
them, we have the purest breathings of the Divine 
Spirit. It is reasonable also to suppose that the his- 
torical collections of the elect people, stamped a£ 
they are with credentials of their acceptance by 
that people from ancient times as historically true, 
would not have been left without some special 
guardianship of the Spirit of truth. But it is the 
deeper truth that the primary seat of the inspiration 
was in the very history itself ; and in a certain sense, 
and that a true sense, it may be said that the whole 
nation was inspired. As Moses could say with 
truth, at a time when Israel was still in the crude 
civilization of nomadic life and so little taught as 
to be easily seduced by false teachers, " The con- 
gregation is all holy, and the Lord is among them ;" 



90 INSPIRATION OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY. 

so, it might be said, the congregation is all inspired, 
and in their assembly is the dwelling-place of the 
Most High. Yes, this was the grand truth which 
was the inspiring principle in the whole life, and 
constitutes the key to the entire history of ancient 
Israel. For this, to bear witness to it, to maintain 
it, to tell it out among the nations, to carry it for- 
ward in the world's history till the times of prepara- 
tion should be fulfilled, when all the world might 
be called to a knowledge of God and salvation 
through faith in Him who is the very Way, the 
Truth, and the Life, might be offered freely to all 
mankind — for just this Israel was chosen to be " a 
peculiar people," and its prophets, leaders, and 
teachers were inspired with a knowledge of the 
Most High, incomparable in clearness and truth of 
perception above the highest thinkings and specula- 
tions of the wisest sages of the Gentile world. It 
need not and ought not to be imagined that Israel 
was alone under Divine guardianship, or carried 
forward in its history alone under Divine direction 
and toward the fulfilment of the Divine purpose. 
It need not and should not be supposed that the 
Divine Spirit withheld His inspiring influences 
from the hearts and minds of all the rest of man- 
kind, necessarily involving the monstrous conclusion 
that all that was true and good in the ancient Gen- 



INSP1RA TION OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTOR Y. 91 

tile civilizations were from some source absolutely 
independent of if not hostile to Him as the Spirit 
of truth. Rather, let it be clearly understood and ad- 
mitted that there can be no possible enlightenment 
of mind or elevation of heart in the world at any 
time or anywhere which is not of God and in God. 
Let it be admitted, as Clemens Alexandrinus in the 
second century and Abelard in the eleventh did not 
hesitate to admit, that the Greek philosophers as 
well as the Jewish prophets might be truly said to 
have been inspired ; and let us not hesitate to add 
this might equally be said — nay, it must be said — 
of all the masters of all true teaching, whether it 
be of poetry, of philosophy, of science, as well as 
directly and specially of religion, because there can 
be no truth which is not the offspring of Divine 
intelligence. But still the conclusion will remain 
that the inspiration of Israel was unique — unique 
in true distinction from all others in ancient time — 
because of its origin, historically traceable in special 
Divine revelation ; because of its being purely a 
spiritual quickening for the perception of the truth 
of Divine righteousness ; and, lastly, because it was 
in the direct line of preparation for the full Reve- 
lation of God promised and perfected in the face of 
Ilis Son Jesus Christ. 



THE 

WITNESS OF HISTORY TO THE DIVINE 
PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE WITNESS OF HISTORY TO THE DIVINE PERSONALITY 
OF JESTTS CHRIST. 

The Old Testament Scriptures bear witness to a 
long era in human history, during which it was be- 
lieved by the people of one nation that God, the 
Sovereign Creator and Ruler of the world, whom 
no man hath seen nor can see, had, by a special 
revelation of His nature and will, taken them into 
a direct covenanted relationship with Himself, and 
that under the terms of this covenant they were 
constituted the commissioned conservators of the 
knowledge and worship of Him on earth, and wit- 
nesses to His righteous government among the chil- 
dren of men. 

There is, however, no warrant in these Scriptures 
for the inference that this covenanted relationship 
was occasioned by any such local or racial favoritism 
as was attributed by other nations of antiquity to 
their tutelary gods. It appears rather to have been 
a stage in the Divine education of mankind, a part 
of the disciplinary process by which the human 
family over all the earth was to be made ultimately 



96 DIVINE PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 

capable of receiving and apprehending a saving 
knowledge of truth which is heavenly and eternal. 
This was not always clearly understood by the elect 
people, but it was the doctrine uniformly and con- 
sistently of their leaders and teachers. In the very 
beginning of their national history, when the an- 
nouncement was first made to them of their Divine 
election for so peculiar a place and purpose among 
the nations of the world, it was on record that they 
were clearly forewarned against the flattering as- 
sumption that they were entitled to such distinction 
because of any special meritoriousness on their part 
in the Divine sight ; and it was in uniform con- 
sistency kept constantly before them, and urged 
with never-failing earnestness upon them by their 
prophetic teachers, that the prerogatives of their 
election were much more those of responsibility 
than of favor, and were intended to be a token and 
proof of the Divine regard in its ultimate scope, 
much more for all mankind than for them exclu- 
sively. 

So that era was, in the very terms and purposes 
of its constitution, educative and disciplinary, and 
therefore it could not be final, but was predestined 
to close with the attainment of its object. There- 
fore it was throughout essentially prophetic, look- 
ing forward always to and yearning for a dispensa- 



DIVINE PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 97 

tion of the last days, when all the kingdoms of the 
earth should be recognized as kingdoms of the Lord 
and His anointed, and all people over all the earth 
should be accepted on equal terms as alike entitled 
to His great salvation. 

No one in Christendom needs to be told that the 
era in which we are living, and which has been in 
existence now for nearly two thousand years, is one 
of such admitted universal right to Divine guardian- 
ship and favor in complete fulfilment of the ancient 
prophetic expectation. The New Testament Scrip- 
tures, which are the authoritative records of the 
way and means in and by which this marvellous 
world-wide change was effected, have their place, 
therefore, for us as an added volume of Holy Writ, 
and are believed by all Christians to be the fullest 
and final expression of the Divine Spirit for the 
saving enlightenment of the human family on 
earth. 

If we had not a lifelong familiarity with the fact, 
it would strike us as a marvel almost beyond possi- 
bility that a volume which had held so long its 
unique place of sacred authority for the teaching of 
Divine truth, with its infallibility thoroughly ac- 
credited, could have been superseded by new writ- 
ings. And certainly it would have been impossible 
had there not been an actual historical evolution, of 



98 DIVINE PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 

which the new writings were the true exposition 
and expression. 

It is certain beyond a possibility of doubt or ques- 
tion that the new era was brought into effective ex- 
istence by the teachings and life of a Jewish peasant, 
from whose birth it dates its beginning, and from 
whose Person it takes its name. No fact of history 
is so indubitable, so absolutely sure as this. Re- 
ligious scepticism has, indeed, sometimes tried to 
speak in doubtful tones concerning the historical 
verity of the personal life seen and known among 
men as that of Jesus Christ ; but the intelligence 
even of infidelity itself has refused to recognize the 
doubt as tenable on any substantial ground, and has 
repudiated the attempt to account for Christianity 
without Christ as but a stupid conceit of ignorance 
itself. So absolutely dependent on Christ, so 
vitally identified with Him in His own personal 
life and as exemplified in His own words and deeds 
are all the distinctive characteristics of the Chris- 
tian civilization, that the profoundly learned and 
thoughtful Baron Bunsen has not hesitated to de- 
clare that " even were we destitute of that which 
we actually possess — a veracious tradition respect- 
ing the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and the history 
of His three years of public teaching — a glance at 
the mental development of humanity during the 






DIVINE PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 99 

last eighteen centuries would compel us to assume 
the existence of some singularly exalted, holy per- 
sonality as the cause and not simply the occasion of 
that revolution in man's view of the universe. "* 

The faith of Christendom has long been settled 
in the only warrantable conclusion, that such world- 
wide and time-enduring vitality must be more than 
human, and therefore that the man whose personal 
life was so demonstrably the fountain source, in 
ever-abounding fulness of its power, must have 
been more than man. Since His life was so un- 
questionably complete a manifestation of the Divine 
in human form, there must be as unquestionable 
reason to say of Him in very truth that in Him 
dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. 

A conclusion which has been ratified by the un- 
doubting assent of more than fifty generations 
would seem to be settled beyond reasonable question ; 
but in these last days, when every point in religion 
is open to free discussion, there is a small but self- 
confident school of sceptical thinkers who fancy 
that it may be evaded by a new theory. Their 
theory is that the Personality, which has been the 
real vital force in all the progress of Christendom, 
is not and has never been the historical Jesus of 

* God in History, vol. iii., p. 7, by Baron Bunsen. S. Wink- 
worth, translator. 



100 DIVINE PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 

Nazareth, but rather an ideal Christ, which the 
faith of Christians has persistently identified with 
Him. Those holding this theory are earnest in 
asserting their acceptance of the historical evidence 
in proof of both the existence and the moral per- 
fection of Jesus as a man, but yet more earnest in 
disbelieving Him to have been in any true sense 
more than man. He was, they say, " the flower 
of humanity," and so, worthy of the admiring love 
and devotion which have been accorded to Him 
through all the Christian ages ; but still only a 
" flower of humanity," a typical example of human 
nature at its best, and in nowise different from the 
rest of mankind except in the excellence of His 
human character. 

This theory is a complete reversion of cause and 
effect in history, since it puts the ideal in the place 
of the Person with whom it is identified, and at 
the same time denies to that Person the characteris- 
tic qualities which alone rendered the ideal possible. 

The ideal conception of human perfection is a 
combination in imagination of all the best qualities 
of human nature in perfect vital symmetry. It 
need not designate any individual as its personal 
subject, but may be a purely abstract conception of 
the imagination. But this is not the way in which 
historical ideals are formed, nor is it supposed to 



DIVINE PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 101 

have been the way in which the ideal of Christ 
was formed on the theory under consideration. It 
is admitted that from the beginning of creation 
down to the introduction of the Christian era in 
the life of Jesus, there had been not only no actual 
realization of the ideal in any human life, but also 
that the life which He lived and the doctrines 
which He taught were transcendent in heavenly 
qualities far above the moral and spiritual concep- 
tions which mankind had before entertained or been 
capable of forming. 

The ideal here, therefore, originated in the ex- 
cellence of the actual personal character. This was 
admittedly so pure and spotless, so pre-eminent in 
qualities admirable and lovable, as to have drawn 
the hearts of men to Jesus — first, of His personal 
followers, and afterward of multitudes through 
their representation — as they have been attracted 
by no other person in human history. And so, as 
time went on, the perfection of this character lias 
been more and more contemplated, and in the con- 
templation more and more admired, and in the ad- 
miration exaggerated, until it came to be taken as 
altogether superhuman, and Christian believers 
would consent to no other explanation of its excel- 
lence than that Jesus was not only the Christ of 
prophecy, but verily and indeed God Himself, mani- 



102 DIVINE PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 

f est in the flesh. ' ' This ideal of Christ, ' ' says one 
of the leaders of this sceptical school, at least in this 
country, " is not the historic Jesus of Nazareth. 
Two thousand years have been at work on that 
ideal, and all the finest and highest thinking of the 
ages since that day have been at work reshaping, 
purifying, lifting, beautifying that idea."* 

Now, without denying at all the idealizing activ- 
ity which has been at work upon the character of 
Jesus through all the Christian ages, it is perfectly 
clear that His character in His actual personal life 
was the original basis of this ideal. The growth of 
the ideal, even though it be a growth, had yet its 
genuine root in His pre-eminent virtue. Now the 
truth, which has been realized by the great body 
of Christian believers, is that unless Christ had been 
from the first believed to have been a person and to 
have led a life of Divine origin and nature, the 
ideal of Him which has obtained in Christian faith 
would have been utterly impossible. 

Let us consider this. 

In the first place, then, it is admitted by all, 
sceptics as well as believers, that in the ideal of 
Christ which has uniformly prevailed, the chief 
reason for His pre-eminent attractiveness has been 

* The Irrepressible Conflict between Two World Theories, 
by Rev. J. Minot Savage, p. 52. 



DIVINE PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 103 

His perfect exemplification of benevolence in abso- 
lute unselfishness. There can be no doubt of this 
in the ideal. But how is it possible to identify this 
ideal with the historic Jesus of Nazareth, unless 
His actual life had been as fully and truly Divine 
as it is represented in the New Testament record ? 
Divest that life, as these theorists would divest it, 
of all that marks it in the evangelical record as 
Divine, and what have we left as a basis for the 
ideal '( In the life of a Galilean peasant — thirty 
years in the obscure privacy of His parents' village 
home and three years as a wandering preacher — 
what was there, in condition or act, to mark Him 
as the unique example of self-sacrificing benevo- 
lence ? He was poor ; but so are the unknown 
millions of every generation. He was for the three 
years of His wandering life without a home, having 
not a place that He could claim as His own to lay 
His head ; but myriads of homeless wanderers — we 
might even say, in simple truth, of tramps — have 
been in like privation and need. He was amiable 
in all His personal intercourse, ever ready to meet 
the needy and the suffering with sympathetic words 
and helpful deeds ; but denying and excluding His 
miraculous beneficence, what recorded act in all 
His life is found to mark Him as the exemplar of 
self-sacrificing benevolence ; or, indeed, as an ex- 



104 DIVINE PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST 

ample of benevolence in any way distinguished from 
the many who are proved to be kind and sympa- 
thetic wherever and whenever there is human need ? 

No. The plain, undeniable truth is that if Jesus 
were a mere man, there was no act of His recorded 
life to show that He was or could have been re- 
garded as a man in any way distinguished for pre- 
eminent goodness. Granting that He was not only 
amiable, without a taint of malice, but also so free 
from notable fault of any kind that He might safely 
put the challenge, " Which of you convinceth Me 
of sin ?" yet even in that respect His character was 
not apparently so superior to many others as to have 
marked His life as exceptional, much less as unique. 
Goodness is not pretentious ; it vaunteth not itself ; 
it proves its blamelessness, not by extraordinary 
manifestations, but simply by fitly meeting each 
little occasion in every- day life ; and there were, 
no doubt, many a man in Christ's day, as there 
certainly are in ours, of whom it could in truth be 
said, even by his most intimate companions, that 
they had never seen a fault in him, and yet have 
been without the least claim to distinction. 

What was it, then, in the actual life of Christ 
that made Him, first, in the eye of His personal 
followers, and ever since in the judgment of the 
civilized world, the personification of self-sacrificing 



DIVINE PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 105 

benevolence, the very type of the enthusiasm of 
humanity ? Is it claimed that it was the altruistic 
tone and spirit of His teachings ? Granting all 
that can be said in appreciation of the helpfulness, 
the uplifting, the ennobling, and exalting character 
of the doctrine which came from His lips, as well 
as of the originality and winning attractiveness of 
His " method," the requirement of the case is still 
not met ; for the ideal of Christ is not only an ideal 
of a teacher, but the ideal of a person, emphatically 
and uniquely of a person. It has been said over 
and over again, and repeated so often simply be- 
cause it is so emphatically true, that Christianity is 
not a philosophy, but a life ; and this is as true of its 
originating ideal as of its exemplary adaptation in 
present experience. 

There is yet another element in the ideal to which 
the unparalleled hold of Christ upon the grateful 
love and devotion of mankind has ever been chiefly 
due, which is equally dependent on faith in His 
Divine nature, and impossible without it. By 
every Christian believer, through all the Christian 
ages, the uppermost thought in the contemplation 
of Jesus Christ, and His claim to perpetual and uni- 
versal gratitude, has ever been the thought of Him 
as the suffering Saviour. But how could this 
thought have originated, how could it ever have 



106 DIVINE PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST, 

found place in the ideal of Him, if Jesus had been 
supposed, from the first knowledge or impression 
of His earthly life, to have been only a man ? In 
that case there could have been no possibility of 
attributing to Him any special condescension or 
voluntary self-renunciation in His low estate, His 
privations, or even His persecutions. He was but 
a peasant of Galilee, and His poverty was but the 
common lot of His class. If He met with opposi- 
tion from the rulers of the nation in His public 
ministry, this was only what might reasonably have 
been looked for by one making and publicly assert- 
ing his pretensions ; and even His final trial and 
execution was but a contingency, the risk of which 
He might have been willing to run for the sake of 
the temporary notoriety and influence which His 
claim to the Messiahship had secured. It is shock- 
ing to Christian sensibility to speak in this way of 
Him whom Christian faith ever regards as the 
adorable Redeemer ; but there is no possibility in 
reason to see how He could be spoken or thought 
of otherwise, if He were not believed to have been 
of celestial origin and Divine nature. As man 
merely, His claim upon the homage and devotion 
of other men, or even their common gratitude, 
would be and must from the first have been felt 
to be decidedly inferior to those which had for cen- 



DIVINE PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 107 

turies before His day been accorded by millions in 
the great Indian Empire, still further east, to their 
reputed Messiah, Gautama ; for the record of the 
life of that Eastern sage was one of poverty, of 
lonely wanderings, of pure self-abnegation, of 
thought only for others and goodness toward others, 
not surpassed in the recorded personal ministry of 
Jesus, and far exceeding it by many years in dura- 
tion ; and he was, at the same time, the undisputed 
son of a prince, to whom therefore all this privation 
and suffering were the voluntary assumption of his 
own purely unselfish benevolence. Even in their 
own national history, the people of whom Jesus was 
born and among whom He lived had an example 
of a suffering prophet with which that of Jesus 
could bear no comparison. Jeremiah, in their his- 
torical record and tradition, had for centuries held 
the place of the great sufferer, and with unques- 
tionable reason. In the faithful execution of his 
Divine commission to " pull down, pluck up, and 
destroy," for more than forty years he was sub- 
jected, by God-defying rulers and a rebellious and 
stiff-necked people, to persecutions, to indignities, 
privations, tortures, incomparably more protracted 
and unendurable than any which the record or 
tradition connected with the experience of Jesus ; 
and, in the final end, the image of Jeremiah stoned 



108 DIVINE PEBSONAL1TY OF JESUS CHRIST. 

to death by his countrymen, violently denouncing 
him as a blasphemer, was quite as replete with the 
pathos of humiliation and pain, to entitle him to 
be regarded as the great sufferer, as that of Jesus 
expiring, by sentence of Roman law, on the cross. 

No ; it could not have been possible for such an 
ideal as that of the Christ, the Saviour of mankind 
— Saviour not only by the purity of His life and 
the beneficent character and tendency of His teach- 
ings, but also and even more truly by His personal 
condescension, humiliation, and suffering — it could 
not have been possible for such an ideal to have 
been formed on the basis of the actual character 
and life of Jesus of Nazareth, unless He had been, 
from the first, believed with assured faith to have 
been more than man. The voluntary condescen- 
sion which was attributed to Him was such as no 
earthly king could claim to parallel ; but it was 
possible — possible in Him or possible its grateful 
recognition by Christians believers — only on the 
assurance of a well-grounded faith in His eternal 
and Divine pre-existence. The suffering, with the 
endurance of which His image has ever been 
stamped in the mind and heart of Christendom, 
could not have been attributed to Him unless His 
Person had been enshrined in the faith of Christen- 
dom as the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins 



DIVINE PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 109 

of the world, the Divine Redeemer, ■" Who, being 
in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be 
equal with God, but made Himself of no reputa- 
tion, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and 
was made in the likeness of men ; and being found 
in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself and be- 
came obedient unto death, even the death of the 
cross." " Surely He hath borne our griefs and 
carried our sorrows." " He hath redeemed us 
from the curse of the law, being made a curse for 
us." " He was wounded for our transgressions, 
He was bruised for our iniquities ; the chastisement 
of our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we 
are healed." " He hath reconciled us in the body 
of His flesh, through death, to present us holy and 
unblamable and unreprovable in His sight." It 
is because and only because the trusting faith and 
grateful and loving adoration of Christian hearts 
has ever found true expression in such utterances 
as these that the ideal of the typical Sufferer, with 
whom no other in all history could for a moment 
be thought of as comparable, has ever been, in all 
ages and among all people, in the light of Christian 
civilization, accepted as identified with Jesus of 
Nazareth, and possibly identified only with Him. 

Now, it is certain beyond question that the ideal 
involving this identification had taken possession of 



110 DIVINE PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 

the mind of incipient Christendom before the books 
of the New Testament were written, for it is very- 
clear that the Christ of the ideal is, in every char- 
acteristic and feature, the Jesus of Nazareth whose 
person is portrayed and whose acts and teachings 
are recorded by the evangelists. That these evan- 
gelists were the personal followers and friends of 
Jesus ; that they knew Him very intimately, and 
had full and accurate knowledge of His life in all 
its aspects and relations ; that their purpose, in all 
sincerity, was to represent Him just as He appeared 
and approved Himself to be in His actual life, and 
therefore that the impression of Him in their narra- 
tives is an accurate reproduction of the impression 
which was made by Him in person upon those who 
lived with Him and knew Him, are conclusions 
which are justified by every accredited test of his- 
torical evidence. But even if the authenticity of 
the Gospels were not so abundantly substantiated as 
it is on historical ground, their historical truth 
would still be determined beyond question by the 
accuracy of the correspondence between fact accord- 
ing to their history and the ideal, which could have 
had its basis only in such fact. The Person whose 
character and teachings are portrayed in their his- 
torical narratives is beyond question the personal- 
ity of the ideal. The only alternative possibly ad- 



DIVINE PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. Ill 

missible in the case, therefore, is just this : either 
they or some equally illiterate persons, shortly after 
the death of Jesus, created the ideal, or else the 
Gospels are accurately true to the life. If we give 
the preference to the first of these alternatives, we 
are met by all the improbabilities which were felt 
and admitted to be insuperable by one so indifferent 
to faith and inclined to sceptical speculations as 
Rousseau, when he wrote, in his "Emile," his 
well-known expression of the impression made upon 
him by the evangelical records : " It is more in- 
conceivable that a number of persons should agree 
to write such a history, than that one should fur- 
nish the subject of it. The Jewish authors were 
incapable of the diction and strangers to the moral- 
ity contained in the Gospel. The marks of its 
truth are so striking and inimitable, that the invent- 
or would be a more astonishing character than the 
hero." To adopt the other alternative, and to hold 
an assured conviction that Jesus was, in person and 
character, exactly what the evangelists represent 
Him to have been, and therefore Son of God and 
man, perfect in both His Divine and human natures, 
is but to give our honest and reasonable credence 
to fact, which more than any other fact or series of 
facts in history has the attestation of all the creden- 
tials by which historical truth is demonstrated, ac- 



112 DIVINE PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST, 

cording to the rule for such demonstration as for- 
mulated bv Mr. Huxley : " The occurrence of his- 
torical facts is said to be demonstrated when the 
evidence that they happened is of such a character 
as to render the assumption that they did not hap- 
pen in the highest degree improbable." 

Yes, the faith of Christendom is not onlv a re- 
ligious, but as truly a reasonable faith. It is not 
mere pious sentiment, much less is it fanatical 
credulity. It is grounded in thoroughly substan- 
tiated historical fact — fact which lacks no point of 
evidence by which the truth of history is univer- 
sally admitted to be demonstrated. It is justified 
by the well-considered, sane, sober judgment of 
the most honest, intelligent, and acute thinkers 
and scholars, with very few exceptions, in all the 
Christian ages. It is the formulated consensus of 
millions upon millions of rejoicing believers, in 
accumulating numbers, out of every nation and 
race, as time since the day of Christ has gone and 
continues to go on. There are, it is true, as there 
have been in every generation of the past, some 
who can persuade themselves that the evidence is 
insufficient. There will always be, no doubt, or 
at least until the fulness of the predicted time, 
when there shall be none to say, " Know ye the 
Lord," constitutional sceptics, and those whose 



DIVINE PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 113 

educational bias inclines their minds more to a con- 
sideration of the difficulties of belief than to a due 
appreciation of the reasons for faith ; but still the 
clear, positive, unfaltering voice of history concern- 
ing Jesus Christ has been in all the ages past, is 
now, and is certain to be in all the future, " Truly, 
this man was the Son of God." 



A Living Consciousness of Communion 

with the Living God-The God of 

Righteousness and of Love— 

The Present Need of the 

Church, and Its True 

Inspiration. 



CHAPTER VII. 

Conclusion : 

A LIVING CONSCIOUSNESS OF COMMUNION WITH THE 
LIVING GOD — THE GOD OF RIGHTEOUSNESS AND OF 
LOVE — THE PRESENT NEED OF THE CHURCH, AND 
ITS TRUE INSPIRATION. 

It has been the single aim of the author in the 
preceding chapters to make it clear that the history 
which is recorded and exemplified in the Scriptures 
of both the Old and New Testaments is true his- 
tory, which means simply that there has been, in 
the actual life of the world, such an era, with such 
a people, under such government, and led and 
taught by such persons as are described in the books 
of the Old Testament ; and that the era in which 
we are now living had its origin in the Person 
whose history is recorded and whose teachings are 
correctly reproduced in the New Testament. 

We have said but little of the special inspiration 
of these books. But this must not be understood 
as implying that we are in doubt concerning such 
inspiration. We would as soon think of doubting 



118 INSPIRATION A PRESENT NEED, 

the poetical inspiration of Homer, Dante, or Mil- 
ton, or the dramatic inspiration of ^Eschylus, 
Sophocles, or Shakespeare, or the philosophical 
inspiration of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, or Kant, 
as of doubting the religious inspiration of Moses 
and the prophets in the Old Testament, or of the 
apostles of Jesus Christ under Him as their Lord 
and Master, and through the enlightening guidance 
of His Holy Spirit, in the New Testament. If 
there are persons who deny or doubt this inspira- 
tion, they simply illustrate the possibility of abnor- 
mal dissent from the general consensus of both 
Judaic and Christian intelligence ; it proves such 
persons to be lacking in the religious sense and 
spiritual perception, just as the failure of one to 
perceive the inspiration of the masters in poetry and 
philosophy would prove his lack of the poetic or 
philosophic sense. The inspiration of sacred Scrip- 
ture, in the religious sphere of thought and feeling, 
has long since been settled by precisely the same 
tests, and there is no derogation of due regard for 
dogmatic authority in saying also it has been de- 
termined in the same way. It was the general con- 
sensus of the Jewish mind, under Divine illumina- 
tion, that determined belief in the inspiration of 
the books admitted into the Old Testament canon ; 
there is no trace of such determination by synodi- 



INSPIRATION A PRESENT NEED. 119 

cal authority. The same consensus of Christian 
thought and feeling in the early centuries of Chris- 
tendom determined belief in the inspiration of the 
books in the New Testament canon. Possibly, 
probably as some think, the use of the word " canon" 
by the early Christian writers was inherited from 
the usage of the Alexandrine grammarians, " who 
designated by the term such of the classic authors 
as they judged to be models of excellence. "* Cer- 
tainly there was no synodical authority till very 
near the close of the fourth century, when the 
Council of Carthage decreed that no books should 
be read in the congregations of the Church, " under 
the name of Divine Scriptures,' ' except those which 
we now have in the Old and New Testament 
canon. 

But whatever opinion may be held concerning 
the method of scriptural inspiration, or the precise 
ground on which its authority is to be recognized, 
is of comparative unimportance. The inspiration 
of the sacred books is not of the letter, but of the 
spirit. Before the inspiration of the books, or 
even of the authors of these books, was the inspira- 
tion of the actual history, which is traceable to 
positive Divine revelations ; and these books are 

* Professor Ladd, Doctrine of the Sacred Scriptures, vol. i., 
p. 638. 



120 INSPIRATION A PRESENT NEED. 

true, or truly inspired, only as they are trustworthy 
records and expressions of such revelations. 

This being taken as true historically, it follows as 
an assured conclusion of faith that God, whom no 
man hath seen nor can see, but who made the 
worlds, and in and by whom we and all things con- 
sist, has never left Himself without witness in this 
world of ours. Having made us for Himself, He 
has endowed us with a religious sense, with spirit- 
ual instincts and aspirations, to lead men every- 
where to feel after Him, if haply they may find 
Him. He has endowed man with reason, to see in 
His works evidences of His existence and His gov- 
ernment of the world. He has given knowledge 
and wisdom by His good Spirit, enkindling intelli- 
gence, quickening a sense of right and wrong in 
good and honest hearts, and animating such hearts 
with yearning desire for true knowledge of Him 
and communion with Him. 

But, over and above all this, He has constituted 
for Himself a chosen body of witnesses, to receive 
and preserve His special revelations of saving truth, 
to instruct and disci pline human society in the 
knowledge and practice of it, to bring all mankind 
within the enjoyment of its enlightening, purifying, 
and uplifting influences, and to carry forward the 
great human family through the life of this lower 



INSPIRATION A PRESENT NEED. 121 

sphere, in steady advancement toward fully devel- 
oped fitness for the eternal life above, which is its 
true destiny. 

This body, under the old dispensation, was the 
chosen, covenanted people, organized as the nation 
of ancient Israel ; and to it was specially committed 
the revelation of His personal nature and His ab- 
solute and eternal righteousness. " Ye are My 
witnesses, saith the Lord, and My servant, whom I 
have chosen : that ye may know and believe Me, 
and understand that 1 am He : before Me there 
was no God formed, neither shall there be after 
Me. I, even I, am the Lord ; and beside Me there 
is no Saviour. 1 have declared, and I have saved, 
and 1 have shewed, and there was no strange God 
among you : therefore ye are My witnesses, saith 
the Lord, and I am God."* 

No other religion in ancient time had such a con- 
ception of the Divine nature or the Divine govern- 
ment. The religions of the ancients that are known 
to us were inspired chiefly by a 6ense of man's 
wretchedness under the ills of life, its calamitous 
and destructive adversities, rather than by a convic- 
tion of its sinfulness or aspiration for perfect right- 
eousness. The religion of ancient Egypt seems to 

* Isa. 43 : 10-12. 



122 INSPIRATION A PRESENT NEED. 

have looked chiefly to consolation by counteracting 
care against the destructive effects of the great 
final catastrophe. Their principal ritual was known 
as the Booh of the Dead, and in both its doctrine 
of metempsychosis for the soul and its elaborate 
methods for embalming and entombing the body, 
it provided, as far as priestly doctrine and rites can 
provide, against the destruction of either the physi- 
cal or spiritual parts of man's nature. The religions 
of Persia and farther India were directed exclu- 
sively against human suffering and sorrow, and in 
the one case prescribed for consolation a philosophy 
of dualism, and in the other, of complete extirpa- 
tion of sensibility to evil by the subjugation of per- 
sonal desire and will. In neither of these does 
there seem to have been any formulated apprehen- 
sion either of righteousness, as conformity to the 
perfectly and eternally righteous nature and will of 
the sovereign God, or of sin, as treason to Him and 
rebellion against His supreme dominion. In later 
times the Greeks had no sense, or at least no formu- 
lated sense of righteousness other than as conform- 
ity to harmonious truth and beauty, and no sense 
of sin other than as unseemly divergence from such 
conformity and ungraceful violation of its princi- 
ples. In the Roman religion the theory of right- 
eousness was simply that of obedience to the law of 



INSPIRATION A PRESENT NEED. 123 

the State, and of sin as treason simply in that sense 
and relation. But to ancient Israel was committed 
the revelation of God as a Personal Being, and of 
the fundamental principles of righteousness as His 
law ; and the one purpose of their history seems to 
have been the education of the human conscience 
in a clear recognition of the fact that this world is, 
in very truth, a province of the Divine govern- 
ment, and the inspiration of men with a true sense 
of their obligation to conform in all its relations to 
the Divine will and aim for the promotion of the 
Divine glory. 

When the fulness of time had come, the revelation 
of the great salvation, for which this educational 
history had been appointed and carried forward, was 
made in the Person of the Only Begotten Son of 
God, by a real participation and experience of 
human life, with its infirmities, and of death, with its 
natural consequences and its redemptive deliver- 
ance. In His life and teachings the revelation of 
Divine righteousness was supplemented by opening 
the minds and hearts of men to see and feel the 
fulness of grace in the Divine love. He main- 
tained, without abatement of one jut or tittle, the 
perfection of the law in its own intent and pur- 
pose ; He, more clearly than any before Him, as- 
serted and insisted upon a standard of absolute sin- 



12-4 INSPIRATION A PRESENT NEED. 

lessness as the only standard possibly consistent with 
the essential and eternal perfection of the Divine 
righteousness ; but in entire consistency with this 
standard brought out — -so brought out as to stir the 
minds and enkindle the hearts of men in its appre- 
hension and to flood the world with its light — the 
glorious truth that God can be just and yet justify 
the sinner. u God so loved the world, that He 
gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believ- 
eth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting 
life."* This was His message, this constituted His 
great revelation. The apprehension of the truth of 
this, as exemplified in His Person and expounded 
and illustrated in His teachings, was at once felt to 
be, and has, in fact, proved to be the salvation of 
the world. 

So the Christian Church took the place of ancient 
Israel as the Body of Witnesses for God in the 
world. Such it was recognized and appointed by 
the Saviour Himself to be, when He gave the great 
commission to His apostles by which they were to 
go forth and convert the world ; for just as in the 
old dispensation it had been said by Jehovah to the 
elect people, " Ye are My witnesses," so now He 
said to them, " Ye shall be witnesses unto Me ;" 

* St. Jolm 3 : 16. 



INSPIRATION- A PRESENT NEED. 125 

and though this was spoken to the apostles directly, 
it was clearly not intended to be limited in its ap- 
plication to them personally, but rather was said to 
them as representing the perpetual and universal 
ministry of the Church ; for He added, " In Jeru- 
salem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto 
the uttermost part of the earth. "* 

This, then, is the special function of the Church, 
to be in the world, everywhere and in all time, the 
authoritative witness for God in Christ, to bring all 
men to the knowledge of Him and salvation through 
Him. 

This means to witness, first, to the truth as it is 
in Him, to tell it out among the heathen and all 
people till the end of time, that the Son of God is 
come and hath given unto us eternal life by the 
remission of sins. In bearing this witness, the 
Church stands before the world with a claim to 
accreditation which is indisputable. It holds from 
Christ Himself the commission to go into all the 
world and preach His Gospel ; it has been consti- 
tuted for this purpose the " pillar and ground," 
the conservator and herald of the truth which that 
Gospel comprises in its fulness, and it traces its 
title to this commission in historical lines and by 

* Acts 1 : 8. 



126 INSPIRATION A PRESENT NEED. 

historical evidences which fully meet all the tests 
that are universally accepted as demonstrative of 
historical certitude. These evidences are, more- 
over, so interwoven with the threads and identified 
with every shade of history as to be not weakened, 
but accumulatively strengthened in the long prog- 
ress of time. We, who have our place in this gen- 
eration, at a remove of nearly two thousand years 
from the original grant of the commission, can bear 
our testimony with tne confident conviction of 
being sustained by more than fifty generations of 
authorized and accredited witnesses, and in bearing 
our testimony we can feel that we are but uniting 
with the acclaiming voice of this mighty host in 
confessing the incarnate Christ as the only begotten 
of the Father, full of grace and truth ; for it is ever 
to be remembered this faith, though thoroughly 
accepted by us individually, is not our individual 
faith. It is the faith of the great Body, which we 
have received from the Body and through partici- 
pation in its life. In confessing the faith we give 
utterance to no new creed. We recognize the fact 
that it is the creed which not only we, but our 
fathers also, and their fathers, and fathers' fathers 
through the ages all along have believingly repeated 
as the declaration of faith in Jesus Christ. So our 
belief in Christ has come to us in such wise that it 



INSPIRATION A PRESENT NEED 127 

necessarily involves the holding to this hereditary 
line of its transmission, and every generation since 
the time of Christ on earth has received it, whether 
by birth or conversion, under the same necessity 
and obligation. If it be thought that the first cen- 
tury was exceptional in this respect, that in tracing 
up the line we reach there an arid and dark waste 
of a hundred years more or less, wherein no trace 
is found, it must be remembered that there never 
was or could have been a moment when the Chris- 
tian faith was proposed to men other than as a his- 
torical faith, and never a person received into the 
Christian Church otherwise than by a baptism 
which meant for him and was received and recog- 
nized by him as putting him into a real vital con- 
nection with Jesus the Christ, who had been born 
by Divine incarnation into the world and had lived, 
died, and risen again for its redemption. But to 
witness for Christ means more than to bear an evi- 
dential witness. It is a witness, even more explic- 
itly and emphatically than that of the elect in the 
elder dispensation, to the Divine righteousness. 
" Think not," said the Lord Himself to His disci- 
ples — " think not that I am come to destroy the law 
or the prophets : I am not come to destroy, but to 
fulfil."* And yet further,! u Whosoever there- 
* St. Matt. 5 : 17. \ Id. vs. 19, 20. 



128 INSPIRATION A PRESENT NEED. 

fore shall break one of these least commandments, 
and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least 
in the kingdom of heaven : but whosoever shall do 
and teach them, the same shall be called great in 
the kingdom of heaven. For I say nnto you, that 
except your righteousness shall exceed the right- 
eousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no 
case enter into the kingdom of heaven. ' ' The reve- 
lation of Divine grace which was made through 
Him did not, in any particular or degree, detract 
from the sense of Divine righteousness which it had 
been the purpose of the old economy to educate in 
the human conscience. Far, indeed, from this its 
purpose and effect. It magnified the law, and made 
it honorable. It sealed and fixed, beyond the pos- 
sibility of change or unsettlement in the conscience 
of mankind, the conviction that the righteousness 
of God endureth forever ; that it is as absolutely 
immutable as the very nature and being of God 
Himself. It showed not only how infinitely above 
any possible touch of wrong or impurity that right- 
eousness is in its essential qualities, but also how 
thoroughly searching and all-including are its re- 
quirements, piercing even to the joints and marrow, 
and trying the very reins of the heart. So 
the Christian Church came for this purpose, 
with more accredited authority and far more 



INSPIRATION A PRESENT NEED. 129 

effective power, into the place of the elect people, 
and continued and fulfilled the function with which 
that people had been charged of old to proclaim 
and to vindicate the righteousness of God in the 
world. But over and above all else, the witness of 
the Church for Christ means the accredited assur- 
ance which it was commissioned to give to the world 
and show forth in it, of the infinite fulness of the 
Divine love. It is impossible for us, whose lives 
have been from the first dawn of our consciousness 
in the full light of this glorious truth of the Chris- 
tian revelation, which, by reason of this, distin- 
guishes Christendom from the world in ignorance 
of it and even from the people to whom were 
granted the partial disclosures of the Old Testament 
revelation. The thought of God to the heathen 
mind is emphatically thought from the visions of 
the night — dim, dark, and terrible ; the thought of 
a power unseen, unknown, and possibly hostile and 
destructive. Even in the Jewish mind it was the 
thought of a Supreme Almighty Monarch, who is 
righteous indeed, but who can by no means clear 
the guilty. If this conception was relieved by 
gleams of the Divine mercy, the relief was only 
partial, and hardly realized in the consciousness ; 
the dominating impression was still that of the 
Sovereign, High and lifted up, before whom even 



130 INSPIRATION A PRESENT NEED. 

archangels veiled their faces, and who could not 
look on iniquity with the least degree of allowance. 
But in Christendom every little child is taught at 
its mother's knees to look up and say, " Our 
Father, who art in heaven," and the thought of 
God as our Father, our gracious, merciful, all-lov- 
ing Father, who has proved His love to us by giving 
His only Son to die for us, is the thought of Him 
which is most spontaneous in every Christian heart. 
Glorious, indeed, the message with which the 
Church of Christ is charged, and sublime its mis- 
sion to proclaim that message in every generation 
till the end of time for the salvation of the world ! 
It would be this if the testimony which the Church 
has to bear were only that of a witness to past reve- 
lations ; but its function is far higher, and charged 
with infinitely more vital power. The Church is 
not only a witness for Christ, but it is, in a true 
sense, the Body of Christ. In it He still lives in 
human society, and by its ministrations still does 
His mighty works among men. In the ascension 
withdrawal of His visible presence He gave His 
disciples most explicit assurance of perpetual con- 
tinuance with them by His indwelling Spirit — an 
assurance demonstratively fulfilled by irrefragable 
proofs, both visible and invisible. The religion of 
Christ is, therefore, in the fullest possible sense of 



INSPIRATION A PRESENT NEED. 131 

the words, a living religion. His disciples are 
charged not only with the commission to be the 
heralds of it, but with vital capacity and consequent 
obligation to demonstrate its power as well as its 
truth by actually living it. The Body of which 
they are members is His inspired Body, and every 
member, even to the least and lowest, has life in 
vital communion with Him through His indwelling 
presence and by the very breathing of His Holy 
Spirit. 

Now, what we especially and most urgently need 
in this generation of the last days is a true, living, 
and realizing sense of this grand Christian privilege 
and obligation. We hear complaints on all sides of 
the decadence of faith in our time. Not always in 
a tone of complaint, but quite as often apparently 
of exultation, it is said that the historic Christian 
theology has had its day, and dogmatic faith has 
lost or is rapidly losing its hold on the minds and 
hearts of men. If so, or so in very considerable 
degree, the reason is not, as is often alleged, in the 
advancing scientific intelligence of this generation. 
It is not occasioned by new discoveries of weak 
points in the Christian evidences or detection of 
unscientific flaws in Christian doctrine. It lies 
much nearer home ; it touches the very principle of 
our religious consciousness. It is a decadence not 



132 INSPIRATION A PRESENT NEED. 

simply of belief, but of real faith. It is a spiritual 
blindness to the realities of the spiritual world, 
because of the fond closeness with which we hold 
continually before our eyes the things which are 
palpable in the world of the present. Mr. Glad- 
stone, in one of his Good Words papers (" good 
words" in more than one sense), has called atten- 
tion to " the increased and increasing dominion" 
in our modern life " of the things seen over the 
things unseen," and our consequent danger, even 
while still acknowledging allegiance to the tradi- 
tionary ideal, of becoming the dupes and slaves of 
sheer materialism. " My twofold proposition," 
he says, " is that we see before us an increased 
power of things seen, and that this increased power 
implies a diminishing hold upon us of things un- 
seen. Throughout the history of mankind, the in- 
visible, and the future which is part of the invisi- 
ble, have been in standing competition with what 
may be termed the things of the world. There 
has never been a time in human history to compare 
with the last half century in two vital respects : 
the multiplication of wealth and the multiplication 
of the enjoyments which wealth procures. . . . 
Obviously, almost mathematically, the increased 
powers of worldly attraction disturb the balance of 
our condition, unless and until they are com pen- 



INSPIRATION A PRESENT NEED. 133 

sated by increased powers of unworldly attraction 
and elevation. Where are such compensating 
powers to be had ? I am afraid we can hardly say 
that, in the spheres now under view, there has been 
such a growth in unworldly motives and ideas as 
to counterveil the augmented strength of worldly 
attachment. And I apprehend that if the unseen 
world and the ideas belonging to it operate upon us 
with a proportionately diminished force, it follows, 
almost as a matter of course, that creeds which 
belong to that circle of associations will be more 
dimly and therefore more feebly apprehended." 
He goes on to say that he has no fear that " mate- 
rialism as a formulated system," or philosophical 
theory of life, is or is likely to be on the increase. 
" But the power of a silent, una vowed, unconscious 
materialism is a very different matter. . . . There 
are in human nature a multitude of undeveloped 
(so to speak), embryonic forces of impressions re- 
ceived from without and finding a congenial soil 
within, which never make their way to maturity, 
or obtain a definite place in our consciousness. My 
belief is that at this moment these untested, not 
thoughts, but rudiments of thought, are at work 
among us and within us ; and were they translated 
or expanded into words, their sense would be no 
more nor less than the old vulgar sense of those who 



134 INSPIRATION A PRESENT NEED. 

in all ages have held that, after all, this world is 
the only world we securely know, and that the only 
labor that is worth laboring, the only care that is 
worth caring, the only joy worth enjoying, are the 
labor, the care, the joy that begin and end with it." 
This is our real danger, this the real cause of 
the scepticism that is perceptibly growing in the 
present age. It is a decadence, not of belief as de- 
pendent on sufficient evidence, but oi faith as the 
realization of the spiritual and eternal. We need — 
oh, how greatly we need— a revival of this faith ! 
We need to feel that this is God's world, in which 
we have our being, and that He is not a dead God, 
but the living God J that He cares for and com- 
munes with His creatures, whom He hath endowed 
with spiritual intelligence, not only by revelations 
in the far distant past, and by causing the substance 
of such revelations to be printed in a book, but as 
truly and as directly now and here, in e very-day 
life and every possible phase of present experience. 
We need a revival of religion in accordance with 
the old definition, the life of God in the soul of 
man. Without this, in vain is all our zeal for or- 
thodox expressions, and to no purpose our scrupu- 
lous adherence to the ritual regulations of the 
Church or insistence upon implicit belief in the 
inspired infallibility of the Book. If there be in 



INSPIRATION A PRESENT NEED. 135 

our faith nothing more than this, it is a dead faith, 
and our God is a fetich. The true God is the liv- 
ing God, and the only true faith is that which has 
its realizing consciousness in living communion 
with Him, with Him in adoring assimilation to the 
pure perfection of His righteousness, and in grate- 
ful and loving admiration of the full graciousness 
of His infinite love. This, and nothing short of 
this, is truly to know God and to. have fellowship 
with His Son, Jesus Christ. 



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